


Overstepping

by rellkelltn87



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Casefic of sorts, Crack Treated Seriously, Developing Relationship, Mad Scientists, Mpreg, Non-Consensual Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-06-29 16:11:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19833763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rellkelltn87/pseuds/rellkelltn87
Summary: When Carisi is briefly taken hostage during an attempt to rescue a woman from a pair of doctors conducting illegal experiments, he and his colleagues learn that an illegal experiment has been conducted on Carisi himself. Carisi, three months into a new and uncertain relationship with Barba, is -- indeed -- pregnant.Crackfic treated far too seriously.





	1. Chapter 1

On a Saturday night in late September, Sonny Carisi found himself holed up inside a police van with his partner Amanda Rollins, staking out a fertility clinic in Rockland County, thirty or forty miles north of the city. The clinic was run by two doctors, Jonathan and Rachel Lampeter, who’d allegedly implanted a rape victim with an embryo while she was recovering from surgery in a downtown Manhattan hospital. Carisi wasn’t one to bust balls (he was), but he nevertheless asked Lieutenant Benson why the hell the case hadn’t been sent up to the feds yet. Benson’s answer: “We’ll send it to the feds when it crosses state lines. For now, it’s ours. We focus on our victim, we get justice for her.”

Benson’s intentions were good. She was revered in some circles as a patron saint of justice. But that didn’t change the fact that Carisi was in a police van on a Saturday night, on a stakeout for a case that was almost certainly broad enough in scope to warrant federal attention. 

“What, you had a date tonight?” Rollins teased, observing Carisi’s leg bouncing up and down, his mouth twitching in frustration.

“No. Just would rather not be here on my night off.”

“You _did_ have a date tonight.” Rollins smirked in Carisi’s direction before turning her eyes back to the monitor. “They’ll understand, I’m sure.”

Carisi cleared his throat.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, waiting for either Dr. Jonathan or Dr. Rachel Lampeter to show up on camera and reveal that they were illegally keeping patients at the clinic overnight or conducting shady medical experiments.

Rollins sighed loudly. “Sonny,” she said, reaching out a hand to steady her partner’s bouncing leg, “look, what you do with your free time is none of my business —”

“Jesus, Rollins, you sound like my sister Teresa.”

“As it was rolling off my tongue I heard my mother,” she said with a shudder. “What I mean is, I don’t overstep and I don’t coddle, but —”

“Unlike me,” he said, catching the irony in her statement.

“You and Barba, how long?”

Carisi raised an eyebrow. “That’s overstepping. Nobody knows overstepping better than me.”

“‘Cause you do it all the time.”

“Yeah. My fatal flaw.”

“I saw you and Barba leave the bar together after Dodds’s funeral.”

“Doesn’t mean anything.”

“Not to someone who’s not a detective. I’m looking out for you because I’ve made this mistake before, and more than once. My involvement with Nick fucked up more than one case since the defense attorneys were so eager to bring it up when one of us was on the stand. I have a daughter with a commanding officer who can’t claim her as his own because of his undercover work. And before you came to SVU, there was another fling that caused a lot of heartbreak on my part.”

Carisi shook his head and kept his eyes fixed on the monitor.

“Liv,” Rollins said, and Carisi flinched. “It was Liv.”

“When?” he couldn’t help asking.

“A few months after I transferred. I sort of idolized her from her workshops, and she didn’t like me. It was hot.”

Carisi laughed. “The lieutenant wouldn’t sleep with someone she didn’t like.”

“Yeah, I know. She must’ve started to like me a few months in. But, oh, Sonny, the crush I had on her when we were first working together, damn it.”

“You’re telling me this because —”

“So you know about all my relationships that defense attorneys might use to tear down my testimony in court.”

“Sure,” Carisi said, “ _that’s_ why you’re telling me.” He squinted at the screen. “That looks like Rachel Lampeter,” he commented.

“Who’s with her?”

“Not Jonathan. I don’t recognize him.”

“There’s another. Two guys in lab coats. Fin wasn’t kidding, it really does look like they’re running some kind of mad scientist lab in there.”

Rachel and the two men moved out of frame and Rollins and Carisi grumbled to themselves. “Hey,” Rollins said after a few more minutes of waiting in silence, “all I’m saying is, getting involved with someone at work, especially in this business, leads to heartbreak at best and IAB at worst. Or the other way around.”

“IAB,” Carisi said with an affected snort.

Rollins’s eyes fluttered closed. “I didn’t see it coming either. And Liv broke it off with me because she was being promoted to sergeant, and was worried about how it’d affect our cases. Meanwhile —”

“Yeah,” Carisi said, puffing out his cheeks.

“When I helped Declan bust the gambling ring, when he saved my life, Liv and Nick thought I’d gone rogue — corrupt — and were furious. Nick forgave me, but it took Liv a lot longer to come around, y’know. So what I’m saying is, if you need a pair of ears, I’m here.”

“Thanks.” Carisi clapped his hands together and leaned in towards the monitor. “Between you and me, I had a thing for him, but like what you’re saying you had for Liv when you first started working for her, a crush. I needed — something — after what happened with Dodds. You know it shoulda been me on that call, we have a lot of experience with DV unlawful imprisonment in the outer boroughs, you know that. But Barba, he’s a lot more — not that this is anybody’s goddamn business — more experienced than me in a lot of ways, and it was good, and it was — it’s been — what I needed.”

“The sex?”

“What the hell else d’you think I’m talking about?”

“Comfort.”

Carisi rolled his eyes. “Yeah, comfort, whatever. I feel bad, to be honest with you, that I’m not a hundred percent on board with figuring out where this goes now.”

“This is why I’m warning you to learn from my mistakes.”

“Looking back, do you really see them entirely as mistakes?”

“No,” Rollins admitted.

“I’ve got to work this out somehow, for myself. Hey — hey look.”

“Shit,” Rollins said through her teeth. 

The two men in lab coats were leading a woman in a hospital gown past the first camera, the one that TARU had installed in the main lab. The woman was stumbling. Each man held one arm as if to simultaneously steady her and prevent her from breaking free.

“The lieu’s not gonna like this, but we’ve got to radio the staties for backup,” Carisi said. “We’re witnessing an assault, no matter how you look at it.”

Rollins called for backup. “You’re right. We’ve got to get her out there. This isn’t a hospital, and whatever it is, it’s fucked up.”

A second camera revealed the woman struggling as the men threw her onto a gurney. “We have to go in,” Rollins said. 

“We’re going in,” Carisi said into his radio. “Potential vic in imminent danger, rush that backup, friends.”

The leapt out of the van and found that the heavy iron front door to the building was locked. “If we break that window, the alarms’ll go off,” Rollins warned.

“Looked like they were wheeling her into the surgical room — the one they told us was for outpatient procedures — all the way in the back. I’ll rush in and you hold down the main exit here until backup comes.”

Rollins, with her gun in her right hand, picked up her baton with her left hand, smashed the window, and climbed inside. She helped Carisi in after her, and both looked at each other wide-eyed when no alarms rang out.

The unusual lack of security alarms made the situation a hundred times more terrifying for the detectives. 

“Reminds me of some of the horror movie-level shit Munch told me was going on with a group of doctors in Baltimore a few years ago,” Rollins whispered.

They stuck to their plan. Carisi ran for the surgical room in the back while Rollins secured the front of the building. 

“Drop it, let the lady go!” she heard Carisi shout, his voice echoing through the empty hallways.

Just as sirens began to wail outside, Rollins heard the crash of metal against metal, two gunshots, and then nothing.

The woman they’d seen on camera came stumbling out from the back of the office. She fell into Rollins’s arms just after Rollins unlocked the front door for a state special operations team. 

“My partner’s in the back,” Rollins said. “I’m not getting anything from him on my radio, heard two shots, you’ve got to get to him.”

The special ops team headed down the hall and Rollins radioed for an ambulance. “Hey,” she said to the woman in her arms, “can you tell me what happened?”

“My doctor referred me,” she sobbed, “and I thought it was safe, ‘cause my doctor referred me.”

“Okay, well, you’re safe now, help is coming very soon. Can you tell me your name and whatever you remember about what happened?”

Rollins heard another gunshot and “officer down!” and “he’s not here!” over her radio so she decided that, despite her fears for Carisi, she could best protect the woman in the hospital gown by leading her outside to wait for the ambulance.

Terror that the “officer down” was Carisi crept into Rollins’s heart. Worse, however, was the “he’s not here.”

“My name’s Ariela Dashkin,” the woman said as Rollins helped her outside. “My doctor — um, Gerald Nord on the Upper West Side — he sent me to the Lampeters because the regular fertility treatments weren’t working for me. I agreed at first to what they wanted me to try —”

“Breathe, okay?’ Rollins said, attempting to comfort Ariela while getting the full story out of her.

Ariela nodded, and more tears ran down her cheeks. “They’re horrible people. I thought I was just going to tell them that adoption was a better route for me, and, uh —”

“My name’s Amanda,” she said gently.

“They’re absolutely nuts, those doctors. They were going to implant an artificial second uterus in me, made it sound like it was an experimental procedure in all the medical journals. When I found out what they were doing had never gone through the FDA or any medical boards, I was suspicious. When I told them I changed my mind, they locked me in here.”

“I’ll come see you at the hospital and get your full statement.” Rollins jotted down Ariela’s name and a few notes as the paramedics helped her to an ambulance. At the top of her notes: _ARTIFICIAL 2ND UTERUS???_

She wasn’t sure whether to hope the feds took the case away from SVU or hope the feds left it with them.

Lieutenant Talia Ramirez, a commanding officer with the state police, approached Rollins. “There’s secret rooms and probably a hidden cellar in there,” she said. “We need all the layout maps you have.”

Rollins took Ramirez back to the police van she’d been sitting in with Carisi less than an hour earlier. “We can’t locate Detective Carisi,” the lieutenant admitted, “which is why we’re looking for an entrance to a hidden cellar. Carisi’s radio and gun were left in the surgical room.”

“Break open the floors.”

“We’ll get there,” Ramirez said.

“You’ve got to let me go back in with you. I can’t leave my partner behind.”

“Your lieutenant isn’t going to want to —”

“Lose both of us, right,” Rollins said, a slight eye-roll masking her intense worry.

An hour in, the state sent a second team to determine how to safely access the hidden cellar from the building or the street. An hour after that, a federal team showed up to assist them. And, just before sunrise, Olivia Benson arrived on the scene.

Rollins first saw her at a distance, being briefed by Lieutenant Ramirez. Benson then moved in closer, examining the exterior of the building and then approaching Rollins, patting her on the back.

“He’s tough,” Benson assured her. “Take the squad car. Go home, be with Jesse, get some rest.”

Rollins bit her lip. “They’ll need my statement when they find him.”

“You already gave it.”

“I know, but if —” She trailed off, pushing the worst case scenario from her mind. “All right. I’ll head home.”

“You can’t think like that, Amanda,” Benson said, her own voice breaking as her concerned frown belied her attempts at reassurance. She raised her arms slightly, inviting Rollins into a hug. “He’ll be fine. We’ll have him home by the end of the day.”

Rollins allowed herself to rest her head on Benson’s shoulder for a split second, then broke the embrace. “Ever since Dodds, I —”

“I know,” Benson said, “same here.”

They heard a loud crash from inside the building and then saw officers scrambling to get through the front door. Benson and Rollins followed slowly behind them, weapons up, one foot in front of the other. A gunshot rang out somewhere below them. 

“I need medics!” they heard Ramirez shout. “And I need the other doctor alive, I need you to take her alive. If they’re both gone we’ve got nothing.”

Ramirez climbed up a ladder from a trapdoor of sorts in the hallway floor and rushed towards Benson and Rollins. “They were stitching your detective up when we got in there,” she told them. “He’s unconscious, looks like he’d been under anesthesia, all —” She brushed a hand across her stomach to indicate where they’d apparently “operated” on Carisi. “I don’t know what the hell they did to him, I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Whatever hospital they take him to,” Rollins said, “you’ve got to make sure they run checks on everybody who works on him. Listen to me, listen, okay, that woman they had in there, Ariela, she said her doctor in Manhattan _sent her_ to these people. That means there’s ordinary run-of-the-mill gynecologists out there sending their patients —”

She stopped when she saw the medics carry Carisi out on a stretcher. “Sonny,” she whispered, moving closer to him.

The medics told her to back off. Benson placed her hands on Rollins’s shoulders. “He’s tough,” Benson reminded her.

“Yeah,” Rollins said, squeezing her eyes shut.

“I’m going to call Ed and make sure everything’s all right at home. Can you see if you can get another briefing on where we are? If Manhattan doctors are involved, so are we.”

Another “yeah” from Rollins, weaker this time.

Ramirez told Rollins that a state officer had shot Jonathan Lampeter dead on sight when they entered the makeshift OR in the building’s cellar; the feds told the staties to stand down and took Rachel alive, which was what Ramirez had wanted in the first place. The two doctors were the only people with Carisi in the OR. Two lab assistants were dead, but it was unclear whether they’d been shot by the staties, the feds, or the Lampeters.

When Rollins filled Benson in, Benson said she’d make sure SVU stayed involved in the investigation. “Something’s going on with this Upper West Side doctor who sent Ariela — the woman we went in there for — to these people,” Rollins said. “So I’ll talk to Ariela, and we’ll go after this guy. Nobody’s getting away with being involved with these doctors who did God knows what to Sonny.”

“I’ll call Carisi’s sister,” Benson said. “I still have her number in my phone from when we worked her husband’s rape case.” Taking a shallow breath, she walked off towards the SUV she’d driven up in.

Rollins walked two blocks in the other direction and called a different number.

“Barba,” came the quick reply on the other end. 

“Hey, um, Barba, I forgot if we had a meeting today about the Ames case.”

“I pleaded that out,” Barba said, half-annoyed, half-bragging.

“Oh, right,” Rollins said. “I completely forgot. Was going to —”

“Okay, then, talk to you —”

“Wait,” Rollins said, a little too loudly. “I was going to call you to cancel our meeting because I’m still upstate. Carisi was taken hostage. State police and feds got him out but he’s in bad shape.” She pushed the words out as quickly as she could.

“Wh — what?” Barba stammered.

“It’s not relevant to our cases, at least not to any cases on your desk yet —”

“Tell me what happened to Carisi.”

“I can’t fill you in until Liv and the feds clear —”

“The feds. What the fuck did Liv send him into?”

Rollins struggled to cover the strangled sobs in her throat. “We were on a stakeout. Had to do with the Madeira case, the one where our victim was “accidentally” implanted with an embryo while she was in the hospital recovering from a brutal attack.”

“My God,” Barba said on the other end, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a gasp.

“They found him getting stitched up in a makeshift OR in the basement of this place, and —”

“What hospital did they take him to?”

“I don’t know yet. You want me to send you a text when I find out?”

“Please,” Barba said, and that was the end of their conversation. 

Benson, meanwhile, had to return to the city in order to get her own people mobilized. She offered to bring Jesse to her place if Rollins wanted to stay. 

“All right,” Rollins said, “just until Sonny’s family gets here. And I have to fill the feds in on Ariela, you know that.”

“I do,” Benson said. Then with a hint of wistfulness, “Thank you for looking out for Carisi.”

—

In the bar after Dodds’s funeral, Barba found himself in that sort of self-destructive mood you get into when the best friend you’ve been in love with for a year but won’t ask to pursue something more because of a serious conflict of interest falls head-over-heals for the head of IAB, when you’re getting death threats by phone and in elevators, when the sergeant you’ve been mocking for months is murdered by a rapist and domestic abuser.

To keep his spirits up, or to keep himself from indulging in a third glass of whiskey, Barba flirted with Carisi, who he knew had a crush on him. He also guessed that Carisi was still parsing his own sexuality at 36, and Barba didn’t have time for the sort of relationship he might have had time or patience for a decade ago. 

But he was in a pleasantly self-destructive mood. 

“Share a cab?” he asked Carisi.

“Sure,” Carisi said.

They wound up together at Barba’s place, making out against a living room wall before Barba removed his lips and tongue from Carisi’s neck, tugged on his belt and asked him if he wanted to move to the bedroom. “Yeah,” Carisi said, reaching down to palm Barba through his suit pants, “that’s what I want, Rafael.”

He could still hear the sound of Carisi’s moans as he sucked the detective off on top of the comforter. 

“Hey,” Carisi said afterwards, and Barba couldn’t help but run a hand through the detective’s dirty-blonde but graying hair, mussed and flattened by sweat, “let me —”

“It’s okay, Sonny,” Barba said, and Carisi laughed at the sound of his own name on Barba’s lips. “You don’t have to do anything.”

“What do I look like,” Carisi said, lifting his head to kiss Barba, “a —”

“This is neither the appropriate time nor place nor decade for that kind of talk,” Barba teased.

“How about _let me show you what I can do with my mouth on your balls_ , how’s that for appropriate?”

“Better,” Barba said, raising an eyebrow.

At three in the morning, Carisi started to rise out of bed. “Don’t go,” Barba said accidentally, sleepily. 

Carisi stopped in his tracks, paused for a moment, and then laid back down. “You all right, Rafael?”

“I’m fine. You’re not.”

“We, uh, can’t let people know about this or defense attorneys will tear apart all your cases from the last two years, even though this is the only time we —”

“Sonny.”

Carisi moved in closer. “So all I had to do to convince you to call me Sonny was get you off? Wish I’d known that a couple months ago.”

In the dark, Barba smirked. “Come here, Carisi.”

“What, no more Sonny?”

“Sonny,” he said, drawing out the two syllables and drawing Carisi into his arms, then moving in for a kiss. “Sonny.” One more kiss — deep, desperate, passionate and lingering this time — and one more “Sonny.”

He could feel the cool, wet tears staining Carisi’s cheeks. “I’m sorry,” Carisi said. “Can’t get it out of my head that it should have been me on that call, shoulda been me and my experience with DV.”

“Shh,” Barba said, holding Carisi tighter, an overwhelming need to comfort the man who’d been an enthusiastic-but-smart thorn in his side for almost two years washing over him. “There’s nothing any of us could have done. Nothing. Sleep, Sonny, sleep in a while and in the morning we can go on with our lives and not create a defense attorney field day at the DA’s office.”

For the rest of May, Barba couldn’t stop thinking about the night he and Carisi had spent together, about how Carisi had needed comfort just as much as he did.

In early June, he and Carisi had dinner at his place and talked about psychic sore spots that neither of them had touched for years. They wound up in bed before dessert. 

By July, Carisi was enthusiastically talking about what he wanted to do to Barba and what he wanted Barba to do to him. Barba was in the sort of relationship he didn’t think he had time for, and he didn’t mind at all, because even though they were mismatched experience-wise, and even though the potential for conflicts of interest was horrendous, the sparring and laughter and companionship and sex were exactly what Barba needed when Carisi was on the other side of all those things. He worried that Carisi’s self-doubt extended well beyond what defense attorneys might do to the DA’s office, but when they were together, he sensed none of that. 

The bitter part of him saw the conflict of interest as revenge. 

The kinder part of him was falling a little bit in love with Sonny Carisi.

When he rushed into Cortlandt Hospital just before noon he was slightly relieved that neither Liv nor Tucker nor anybody from IAB was there to see him looking upset and disheveled. He nodded at Bella Carisi and went over to Rollins, who led him into the hallway outside the waiting room.

“His parents are visiting him now in recovery,” Rollins said, “and I’’ve got to get home to Jesse, but this case is a goddamn mess, and what happened to Sonny might be a lot worse than any of us thought, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Go home,” Barba told her. “The case, the original case, will have to go to federal prosecutors anyway.”

Rollins tilted her head to the side, feigning confusion.

“Obviously you called me for a reason. I’m surprised he said anything to you.” His face fell. “What happened?”

“Those doctors implanted something in — or outside of — Sonny’s stomach and the surgeons here couldn’t remove it because there’s explosive devices attached to either side.”

“Has a bomb squad been called?”

“Of course. They’re in with the surgeons now. The surgeons might have to open Sonny up again before the end of the day. Liv and the state lieutenant are questioning one of the doctors who did this to him. But nobody’s told Sonny yet. We’re not telling him until the surgeons and the explosives experts know for sure what’s going on. This is way outside everyone’s experience.”

“I should head back down to the city and —”

“You know you’re of more use here than down there.”

“What am I supposed to do? He’s only out to Bella, and even she doesn’t know about us.”

“You can’t be involved in the —” Rollins bit her lip and cut herself off.

“What?” Barba prompted. 

“I need to talk to a surgeon.”

“Rollins,” Barba pleaded, “tell me.”

“Those doctors, the Lampeters, are fucking mad scientists if that’s even really a thing. I hope Rachel — she’s the one of the two they took alive — talks, she’d better talk. The woman Carisi and I rescued last night, Ariela, said they were trying to implant an artificial uterus in her.”

Barba’s eyes bugged out of his head. 

“Yeah,” Rollins said slowly, seeing that they were on the same page.

“That can’t —”

“There’s a lot of things I thought couldn’t happen before I came to Manhattan SVU.”

By two o’clock, Rollins and Barba were in a conference room with two surgeons and Bella Carisi. “I’ve got to get home to my baby,” Rollins said, threading her fingers through her hair, “and one of you folks gets to tell Sonny he’s pregnant with an embryo and two small explosive devices.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I joked that someone should write a Barisi mpreg fic that's done in a screwball comedy style, but while considering the logistics of that, this happened. So please "enjoy" this crack-treated-far-too-seriously multi-chapter deep-dive.
> 
> This will probably involve Benson/Rollins too, so I'll tag as I go along. Other past relationships won't be tagged so as not to spoil certain aspects of the story.
> 
> Let me know in the comments or on Twitter if there's anything that I haven't tagged for but should tag for, because this is clearly much, much weirder (and probably stupider and more disturbing) than any other SVU fic I've written. Will probably tag for internalized biphobia as well because that's how my brain insists on writing Carisi.
> 
> I have other writing things to work on in August, so there will probably be a monthlong gap between chapters at some point.
> 
> One more note: most of my previous fics that involved S19-20 plots have been orphaned in an attempt to resist my urge to delete them. (They're mostly Barson. I'm a multi-shipper. They're all so pretty.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said "slowish updates," WHY HAVE I WRITTEN A SECOND CHAPTER WITHIN 48 HOURS?
> 
> I am taking this way too seriously. Enjoy the incredibly stupid plot twists!

Luckily for Benson, Lieutenant Talia Ramirez and the feds decided that the best venue for interrogating Dr. Rachel Lampeter was an FBI facility in New York City, which meant that SVU could participate in (most of) the investigation, particularly with regard to the assault of Ariela Dashkin, the woman Rollins and Carisi had rescued the previous night. Unluckily for Carisi, it seemed that Rachel Lampeter legitimately had no idea how to disable the two small explosive devices attached to either side of the artificial uterus that she and her husband had implanted behind Carisi’s small intestine.

Benson had let Ramirez take the lead for much of the interrogation, but stepped forward when she noticed that Rachel’s hands trembled as they clutched a cardboard coffee cup. “You were a top surgeon in Manhattan for years,” Benson said. “Is the hand tremor why you had to give it up?”

“My hands are shaking, Lieutenant, because I’ve been awake for 36 hours and am on my fourth cup of coffee. And for the record, I had to stop performing surgeries because of carpal tunnel syndrome, which is not unheard of in my line of work. I went into private practice as a gynecologist ten years ago.”

“And then five years later, you gave that up to work in your husband’s illegal lab.”

Benson wondered why Rachel hadn’t lawyered up yet. They’d informed her of her rights more than once.

“You still delivered babies during those years you were in private practice. You cared for patients. You had a regular day-to-day OB/GYN practice. Why would you give that up?”

The sharp puff of air Rachel breathed out through her nose told Benson that she was on the right track. “A regular day-to-day practice wasn’t your cup of tea? Believe me, I get that.”

Her empathy was only half-disingenuous: a week or so after they’d returned from Paris, Tucker asked — begged, practically — her to retire with him so they could shed all the burdens of NYPD together and live a quiet life as forensic consultants in rural Pennsylvania. 

Of course, unlike Rachel, Benson’s reaction to the idea of retirement was _not_ to implant embryos, artificial uteruses, and explosive devices in non-consenting patients.

“I was doing important work,” Rachel insisted.

“You were.”

“I’d have had CDC approval for a clinical trial of my artificial uterus within two years if I hadn’t left.”

Benson and Ramirez already knew that wasn’t true, that Rachel’s applications had been rejected, repeatedly, long before she’d stopped performing surgery. 

“We’ll worry about all the rest later,” Ramirez said. “Right now, you need to do your sworn duty as a physician. First do no harm.”

“What do you want?” Rachel said weakly. “Whatever I say in here, you’ll use to incriminate me, and I’m sure to you I look very much like a criminal.”

Benson took the seat opposite Rachel. “We know you’re not the type of doctor — the type of surgeon — who would implant an embryo or artificial uterus without consent. We know you’re not the type who’d drug a detective and implant explosive devices inside him. First do no harm, right, Rachel?”

“My career was all I had, and with all the rejections, with the CDC telling me my life’s work was crap, it was already in the toilet,” she said hoarsely.

“Tell us what you know about the explosive devices,” Ramirez said. “That’s what’s most important.”

“The — explosive devices — that was all Jonathan, I swear on all the hopes and dreams I had for my artificial uterus. He got them from a connection he had outside the country. I thought they were either bullshit or a federal agent setting Jonathan up, so I stayed out of it. Your detective has a big problem if what Jonathan told me was true. There’s a timer on the devices set to 36 weeks. If they remove the artificial uterus before then, the devices go off.”

“How are the timers set?” Ramirez asked. She was taking notes at lightning speed even though the interrogation was being recorded. “We have a life we need to save here.”

“From a computer in the lab. I told Jonathan that if we were going to do trials without CDC approval, we should just compensate a willing assistant.”

“I’m going to talk to the FBI tech folks,” Ramirez said. “We’ll see if they found anything new.”

“I think Jonathan got the devices from Canada, or they passed through that way.”

Benson nodded at Ramirez. Rachel was now genuinely trying to be helpful, a promising turn of events.

“I’m only here to find out more about what happened to Ariela Dashkin last night,” Benson said. “But I’m worried about my detective.”

“I don’t know,” Rachel said, overwhelmed. “We were full of ourselves, too bold, I don’t know.”

“Does Ariela —”

“No, no, she originally consented to the procedure.”

“I’m the commanding officer for SVU. I could give you a lecture or two on withdrawn consent.”

“But this isn’t sex,” Rachel said, a desperate sideways from on her face, “this is _medicine_.”

“Do you hear yourself?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Setting an explosive device so my detective has to carry a pregnancy to term, do you realize how —”

“How cruel that is? Believe me, I told Jonathan. But you won’t believe me, you have no reason to believe me.” She reached across the table. “Let me have your pen and paper, Lieutenant Ramirez, I’ll write down for you the combination of hormones you’ll need to give Detective Carisi so he retains the pregnancy long enough for you to figure out how to disable the devices.”

Ramirez slid the pen and paper over to Rachel. “You know it from memory?”

“Yes. I’ve been working on this for fifteen years.”

When Ramirez left to brief her FBI contact, Benson leaned in close. “Rachel,” she said, “get yourself a lawyer. But answer all of Lieutenant Ramirez’s questions about Ariela Dashkin and Julia Madeira and Sonny Carisi. This is about their health, their lives.”

Rachel nodded. Benson hoped they’d reached an agreement.

—

Bella Carisi offered to be the go-between for the surgeons, investigators, and her family, since her parents and sisters had only processed what they’d been told about Carisi’s condition with anger and confusion. She was angry and confused too, but was willing to calmly ask people to repeat themselves rather than bark at them to speak louder, as if the only barrier between the Carisis and comprehension of a bizarre, unheard-of situation was loudness.

As of eight o’clock the evening after Carisi and Rollins had stormed the Lampeters’ lab, no doctor, detective, or family member had yet told Carisi exactly what had been implanted inside him.

“Flip for it,” Bella suggested to Barba when it was just the two of them left in the waiting room.

Barba lifted his feet up onto a table littered with magazines; he was still in the gray suit he’d worn to work that morning, minus the tie and jacket, which were on the seat next to him. “You’re his sister.”

“You’re his boyfriend.”

“He told you that?”

“No. You just did.”

Barba let out a soft snort. “I see the wise-assery runs in the family. When do you enroll in law school?”

“I’ll make you a deal. You tell him he’s — pregnant? — and has two explosive devices attached to his fake uterus, and I’ll run interference when he tells the rest of ‘em about you.”

“Again, when do you enroll in law school?”

Bella laughed. “Tell me he’s gonna pull through, Rafael,” she said suddenly. “I’m really scared. That’s why I don’t know if I can go in there and tell him.”

“The FBI is looking for the sources of the explosive devices now.”

“The one FBI guy said he might have to carry the pregnancy to term. I’m so scared for him, y’know?”

“So am I,” Barba admitted, his eyes fluttering closed. “But it’s a deal. I’ll see if he’s awake. I’ll talk to him.”

“I’m so glad he has you,” Bella said through tears.

“We’re not exactly —”

“Whatever. Sonny could explode, like a ticking time bomb, literally. There’s no time for wringing your hands about a “what are we” conversation.”

Barba pursed his lips into a thin smile and went down the hall to Carisi’s room.

Carisi was awake, sitting up in the recliner next to his hospital bed, browsing his phone. “They just had me sign off on a hormone injection, but they said I had to wait for a doctor or a detective to explain exactly what happened to me. What the fuck’s going on?”

Barba swallowed hard and pulled up a chair from the corner of the room, seating himself directly in front of Carisi. Placing both hands firmly in his own lap, he leaned in. His voice cracked when he asked Carisi how much he knew about what had happened in the Lampeters’ lab. 

“I don’t remember anything,” Carisi told him. “The doctors here found something inside me and had to leave it there, they can’t give me the good painkillers, and they have to give me hormone injections. I’m usually better at putting two and two together, but — Raf, are you crying?”

“No,” Barba said, but he was certain his eyes were bloodshot, maybe a little wet.

“How bad?” Carisi asked.

“You’re pregnant.”

Carisi smirked, but then his face quickly fell. “Come on, Rafael, you’re bullshitting me, tell me right now you’re bullshitting me, ‘cause with the hormones and painkillers and what I saw in that goddamn lab, me being pregnant makes a whole lot more sense than it would the other 364 days a year.”

“The Lampeters were working on an artificial uterus. The woman you rescued — you saved her life, Sonny — was kidnapped when she changed her mind about participating in their experiment. They implanted an artificial uterus with an embryo inside in —”

“In _me_?”

“Yes.”

Carisi leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. “Why can’t they remove the uterus?”

Barba took one of Carisi’s hands and squeezed his fingers. “Rafael,” Carisi said, his voice barely a whisper, “tell me.”

Barba carefully explained to Carisi what he knew about the explosive devices. “They’re working on figuring out the mechanism,” he said, trying to be reassuring, but clearly failing miserably, “but what Liv knows so far is that they’re set to go off if the uterus is removed before 36 weeks.”

Carisi freed his hand from Barba’s grip and stood up, pacing the floor. “Be careful,” Barba warned.

“It’s fine. The doctor said I can’t lie in bed or sit in the chair too much ‘cause of the hormones — goddamn it, Raf, is everybody in this hospital in danger because of the explosives? Goddamn it.” His voice and hands shook. “Damn it, just let ‘em —”

“Sonny!” Barba stood, crossing to the other side of the bed so he could stand eye-to-eye — rather, eye to throat — with Carisi. “Please.” He reached out again, placing one hand on each of Carisi’s arms. “Please,” he repeated, turning his eyes upward to catch Carisi’s gaze. “They don’t know a lot yet about the devices. From what I’ve heard from Liv, it sounds like they were intended to harm only you, not anyone else around you.”

Carisi hung his head. Barba stayed where he was. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” Carisi said.

“You won’t.”

“I’m literally a ticking time bomb.”

“This isn’t your fault.”

“I didn’t know how bad it was, when I went in there —”

“This isn’t your fault. You saved that woman’s life.”

“But if —”

“Shh,” Barba said, wrapping his arms around Carisi’s waist. “Don’t worry.”

Carisi let out a strangled cry.

“You’ll be fine,” Barba tried to promise.

“What if I —”

“NYPD, state police, the feds, they’re all working overtime to figure this out.”

“Yeah,” Carisi said half-heartedly. He sat on the bed, lifted his legs, and carefully scooted back. “This is unreal. Lampeter shoulda just shot me.”

“Sonny.” Barba sat with Carisi and reached out to cradle his head. “I’m glad he didn’t.”

“Now you and my family have to watch me — explode — or something.”

“The doctors and detectives will figure something out.” Barba closed his eyes, then opened them halfway. “I need you here.”

Carisi laughed. “You _need_ me?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I was a pain in the ass law student who —”

“You passed the Bar. You’re a pain in the ass lawyer now.” Barba leaned over and kissed Carisi. “The Brooklyn ADA’s office still has positions open. You should apply, get some experience under your belt, because Liv’s going to want you on the team when I’m appointed to the bench.”

“I’ve never heard you be so optimistic about the bench before.”

“I want you to be optimistic. I’m setting an example.”

Carisi cracked a smile. 

The words _I love you_ were on the tip of Barba’s tongue. 

Carisi rested his cheek on Barba’s shoulder. “It’s okay,” Barba said, running his free hand along Carisi’s arm, “you’re okay, ‘stoy aqui, I promise.”

He stayed with Carisi until he fell asleep. When he headed back out into the hallway, Barba found a still teary-eyed Bella waiting for him. “You told him?” she said.

Barba nodded.

“How’d he take it?”

“As well as you’d think.”

“Poor Sonny,” she said. “Somebody’s got to stand up for him and tear everybody involved with this lab a new one. I’m coming back tomorrow, will probably have Teresa or Gina in tow.” She scrubbed one hand over her face, followed by a loud sniffle and a shallow sigh. “You love him?”

Barba smiled sadly. “Let me tell him that first.”

“How long’ve you been together?”

“You can ask Sonny yourself whether we’re “together” or not.”

“I just wanted to be prepared. I said I’d run interference, and I’m a woman of my word.”

“He’s a 36-year-old man. I don’t think he needs you to —”

“You underestimate the ability of my parents and sisters to not stop talking when it’s time to stop talking.”

“The bigger issue at the moment is that Sonny is pregnant and —”

“Could spontaneously combust any minute, yeah. I’ll knock some sense in him, tell him it’s time to step up to the plate.”

“Give him a break. After what he’s just been through, he can decide what he wants.”

“The couple of times I heard him talk about you, during that piece of garbage Donna Marshall’s trial and when he was studying for the Bar, it was like you hung the moon. And you did really good by us, by me and Tommy. I’m sort of rooting for you and my brother, like when you have a favorite couple on a TV show you really want to get together, y’know?”

Barba didn’t watch a lot of TV.

He’d taken Carisi home that night in May on a self-destructive impulse, one of _I’ll show you a conflict of interest_ , saw how desperately Carisi needed comfort and was taken by surprise by how much he wanted to be a source of that comfort. A month ago, he’d caught himself falling in love.

—

“Hey,” Tucker said, joining Benson on the couch after he’d finished loading the dishwasher, “what’s wrong? It’s not Carisi, is it?”

Benson’s head was in her hands. “It’s _been_ Carisi for over a week now.”

Tucker ran an open hand up and down her spine. “They figure out where the explosives come from yet?”

“If they did, they wouldn’t tell me.”

“Come on, you and I, we’re nosy people. It’s how we get our police work done.”

That made her briefly crack a smile, and she sat up before reclining against the back of the couch. “What d’ya think, is it about time for retirement?” Tucker asked. “I’m not trying to push you, but —”

“You are.”

“It’s not good for you, staying on the job so long. In all my years on the force, all my years with IAB, I’ve never met anybody else for who every time a case lands on their desk, there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll have a personal connection to it.”

“You’re exaggerating,” she said, and as he leaned in to kiss her, her cell phone buzzed against the coffee table. According to the screen, the call was from Medical Examiner Dr. Melinda Warner.

The display on the cable box read 9:30. Benson had long since learned that any call from Warner after 6PM did not bear good news.

“I’ll wait for you in bed?” Tucker prompted.

“Yes.” Benson picked up the phone as Tucker disappeared into the bedroom. “Good evening, Melinda.”

“Liv,” Warner said seriously.

“Please tell me this isn’t about Carisi.”

“He’s still in the hospital upstate, as far as I know. I’m only allowed to deal with the medical side of the Dashkin and Madeira cases, as you know.”

“What’s going on?”

“You’ll most likely be getting a call from the FBI in the morning.”

Benson stood and walked into the kitchen, out of earshot of Tucker. “About Julia Madeira or Ariela Dashkin?”

“About the frozen embryos they found in the Lampeters’ lab. There were seven. One is presumably inside Carisi. The good news you’ll hear is that the DNA matches the DNA from Julia Madeira’s abortion last month.”

Good, Benson thought, that clinched the Lampeters’ involvement with the in-hospital assault on Julia Madeira.

“Liv, the DNA is also a partial familial match with two people in the database: your father and your brother. The FBI hasn’t called me yet — they sent this over a secure server — but its pretty clear to me that your eggs were used for these embryos.”

As soon as Warner said “partial familial match with” Benson knew what was coming, and shuddered at the possibility that the embryos were hers, fertilized by donor sperm for her and Alex Cabot some fifteen years ago, before Cabot had to disappear into witness protection. She and Cabot had briefly reunited a few years ago, not long before Barba became SVU’s dedicated ADA, but Cabot had become distant, disillusioned, angry with the system. They’d lost track of each other, and maybe that was for the best.

Dr. Nord, the fertility doctor who’d sent Ariela Dashkin and possibly other patients to the Lampeters, had once worked in the clinic where Benson’s frozen embryos had been storied. 

All of this came to mind as soon as Warner said “partial familial match,” but the only word in Benson’s throat was a loud, exasperated “ _What?_ ”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case it's not clear, this story begins in September 2016, four months after the end of Season 17. 
> 
> I promise a little bit of levity and Carisi introducing Barba to bridge-and-tunnel sandwich culture in Chapter 5, ok? ;-)

An hour before dawn, two men and a woman sat on cold metal folding chairs in an abandoned warehouse somewhere near the Hungarian-Romanian border. Neither they nor their guest, the leader of an Irish crime syndicate, were entirely sure what side of the border they were on.

“Mr. Corcoran,” the older man said, standing and reaching out a hand to their guest, who’d just been led in by two heavily-armed guards.

Corcoran, the crime syndicate leader, smiled warmly. “Mr. Zurzavar.” He nodded at the others, who he didn’t recognize from previous meetings, knowing enough not to ask for names.

After exchanging formalities and news of business abroad, Corcoran got to his point. “I hear you’ve managed to get a hold of explosive devices developed in the States,” he said.

“Where did you hear that?” Zurzavar asked, sitting back down in his folding chair.

“My Canadian contacts,” Corcoran said, pacing the room. “I want in. I’ll get you more distributors in Eastern Canada. My organization needs in on this.”

“You’re misguided. We are not in the business of distributing FBI-grade weapons.”

“My people tell me otherwise.”

Zurzavar glanced back at the blonde woman sitting behind him. She quickly shook her head.

“Then you’re the one distributing the FBI-grade weapons,” Corcoran said, moving closer to the woman.

“No,” she told him firmly. Switching to Romanian, she asked Zurzavar if Corcoran could be trusted.

“Can you get him more?” Zurzavar asked, in Romanian.

“I doubt it.”

“Too bad,” Corcoran said.

“You are multilingual, Mr. Corcoran,” the woman said flatly. Corcoran was surprised by her Eastern Bloc-tinged English, because her fluent Romanian belied traces of an American or Canadian English speaker. “I can point you to a source, if you give us something in return.”

“Distributors, for whatever you need.”

She looked to Zurzavar, who nodded in agreement, then gave Corcoran the name of one of her contacts. “He and I work mostly with doctors,” she explained. “So if he can’t help you, that’s not on us.”

“Mad scientists,” Zurzavar said with a laugh.

The woman, who had still not revealed her name, glared at Zurzavar.

“Come on, now, Gabriela, Corcoran here has been on our side a long time,” Zurzavar said. “You’ll see, when you talk to our friend, he doesn’t do this as weapons trade. He does it for doctors. They got a man pregnant in America.” Zurzavar cracked a wide smile, laughter filling his throat. “But whatever brings the money our way, I don’t care if they make the ceiling or my foot pregnant. She owes favors, Gabriela, that’s why she’s with me.”

“But I do most of my work on my own,” Gabriela insisted. 

“Tell your friend I’ll be calling him,” Corcoran told her. “And if you still owe favors, maybe I can help.”

Gabriela threw her head back dismissively. “Was that a come-on? A bad one?”

“I meant I could use someone smart enough to get their hands on FBI-grade weapons in my organization.”

She smirked. “We’ll talk later.”

—

Sunlight peeked through the blinds of an Upper West Side apartment, burning Carisi’s closed eyes, and for a split second, everything he’d been through in the last two weeks was all a dream, a figment of his tired imagination, his exhausted mind. He stretched his arms out to his sides, and a muscle spasm caused him to accidentally smack Barba in the face, directly on the nose.

“Watch it!” Barba snapped.

“Sorry,” Carisi mumbled, keeping his eyes shut in the faint, faint hope that his tense muscles and restless limbs were not actually the result of the pregnancy that the late Dr. Jonathan Lampeter was forcing him to retain.

He flipped onto his side and saw Barba rubbing his nose. “Sorry,” Carisi repeated, resting an open hand on Barba’s chest. “Was an accident.” Keeping his eyes open only narrowly, so that all he could see was Barba next to him, he kissed Barba’s neck, then his shoulder, then a nipple, teasing it with his tongue for a moment before asking, “How ‘bout I make it up to you?”

“It’s after 8. We slept in.”

“You call 8 o’clock on a Saturday “sleeping in”? Listen up, Rafi.”

“Are you—?” Barba asked, peeking under the covers. “That’s not just your usual morning salute?” Carisi only called Barba _Rafi_ when he really needed to get off.

“Yeah,” Carisi said, his lips on Barba’s, “yeah, come on, Rafi, give me what I need.” Carisi ignored his own tense muscles and threw a leg over Barba, willing what had happened in the Lampeters’ lab just over two weeks ago into nightmare territory where it belonged.

“You have to take the hormones before 9,” Barba reminded him.

Carisi closed his eyes again. “No, no, no, that was all a dream, please let me have five more minutes where I can believe it was all just a dream.”

“That’d be denial,” Barba observed.

“The five stages of — ugh, just let me have five more minutes.”

Barba kissed the side of Carisi’s head. “Okay, five minutes,” he promised. With his lips pressed to Carisi’s shoulder, he palmed their cocks together. “You’re sure this is safe?”

“I told you last night, I’ve done it myself twice since I’ve been home.”

“You’re sure?”

“Damn it, Barba, trust me, it’s safe. One of the doctors said the — the _experiment_ — inside me is closer to my stomach than my balls.”

In response, Barba used his free hand to cup Carisi’s balls. “That’s it,” Carisi said. “That’s it, Rafi.”

Barba worked them both for a few minutes, whispering, “come for me, amorcito,” raising his voice at the end almost like a question. 

“Yeah, Rafi, _yeah_ ,” Carisi said, placing one hand on each of Barba’s temples, kissing him as he came through Barba’s fingers. 

Barba followed soon after.

“It’s just us,” Carisi said, as if he was still trying to hold on to the fantasy that nothing unusual had happened in the last two weeks, “just you and me.”

Barba allowed their next kiss to linger. When he pulled away, he told Carisi to clean up and take his medicine.

“All right, Mom.”

As Carisi rose out of bed, Barba flipped him the middle finger. For a split second, they were where they were three weeks ago, before the stakeout, before the attach.

The injection kit on Barba’s dresser brought Carisi back to reality. He’d been staying with Barba since he’d been released from the hospital. The doctors and detectives didn’t want him to go home alone because of the explosive devices, so Barba offered his place, an easier commute than Staten Island or South Brooklyn while Carisi worked a desk at the 16th precinct, wearing a vest that FDNY and the feds had designed for him _just in case_.

Bella, as promised, was running interference with the other Carisis, making sure they had their priorities in order.

Carisi threw up most of his breakfast. A week ago, he’d casually mentioned to his doctor that he had no “morning sickness” or nausea in spite of the injections; Dr. Rachel Lampeter, held without bail in federal custody, advised Carisi’s doctors to raise his dose of progesterone.

One of the people who’d tried to murder him — or, rather, one of the people who was willing to leave his life hanging by a thread for the sake of an experiment — was now apparently trying to save his life.

Or, he realized, she was simply trying to save her experiment.

Barba knocked on the bathroom door. “Sonny, are you all right?”

Carisi spit out the last of the water he’d used to rinse his mouth. “Yeah, for now,” he told Barba. When he opened the door, he saw concerned green eyes looking up at him. 

“I love you,” Barba said.

“You’re only saying that ‘cause we don’t know how long —”

“No discussion or worrying or handwringing. I love you.”

“Same here,” Carisi said, reaching out an arm to Barba and pulling him close.

—

Benson was holed up in her office, trying to get caught up on cases that _didn’t_ involve her detectives or her DNA, when Rollins knocked on her door. “Hey,” Rollins said, letting herself in, “the feds picked up Dr. Nord. He was probably acting as a middleman between the Lampeters and a larger crime syndicate. You want to take a ride?”

“I … can’t,” Benson said.

“We can nail him to a wall for sending Ariela to the Lampeters. We also need to find out whether he was involved in what happened to Julia, the reason we were on that stakeout in the first place. I know we can’t touch anything involving Sonny, but —”

“Close the door.” Benson pursed her lips and folded her hands on her desk. “You and Fin are going to be answering to Captain Hammond downstairs on the Dashkin and Madeira cases from here on out.”

“Why?”

“The DNA from Julia’s abortion matches the DNA from the seven embryos recovered from the lab.”

“And?” Rollins was still standing, her lips and one leg twitching impatiently. “What does that have to do with —?”

“The embryos were mind. Alex Cabot and I froze them a very long time ago. Dr. Nord worked at the same clinic.”

“That means Sonny is probably —”

“Yes. My only concern is for Carisi’s safety, though. When Alex and I briefly reunited, it all fell apart for good and — well, you remember.”

Rollins smirked down at the floor. “I do. You had a fight, weren’t speaking to each other, she broke your heart — how selfish would I be to say that was a good night?”

“Very,” was Benson’s answer.

“That’s fair.”

“We fought over the embryos, that’s the part I didn’t tell you back then. I wanted to try to get pregnant, with or without her involvement. Alex refused. She’d insisted fifteen years ago that we draw up a detailed, ironclad contract so that the donor couldn’t make any parental claims and — why am I telling you this?” Benson turned her eyes upwards, toward the ceiling, and rubbed the back of her neck. “Long story short, Alex wanted the embryos destroyed or donated for genetic research.”

“But the eggs were yours.”

“She had half the rights to them. There was no same-sex marriage in New York in 2002, and common law barely covers embryo ownership. The contract made a lot of sense at the time. So I agreed, four years ago, to donate them, and that’s what we told the clinic.”

“I’m sorry, Liv.”

“She’s retired now, from the DA’s office at least. Became very frustrated with the system, started practicing privately, representing domestic violence survivors. But I haven’t heard from her in two years. I’m worried she had to go back into witness protection. But whatever’s happened, Carisi has it worse than any of us. Go make sure the Dashkin and Madeira cases are unquestionably connected to the Lampeters.”

“Can Barba participate in the prosecution if …?” Rollins trailed off, wrinkling her forehead as she considered a question that she probably shouldn’t ask.

“Rafael’s decided to keep me at a professional distance from here on out. For now, what is undisclosed — officially — is off the table.”

“Gotcha.”

“But I’m glad Barba’s happy.”

—

Benson adjusted her blazer and inhaled deeply as she prepared to enter the DA’s office. “Mr. McCoy,” she said when he invited her inside, “I thought it was only right to keep you informed about the cases involving Jonathan and Rachel Lampeter.” _To inform you that the News and the Post are probably going to fixate on a minor detail of the case that will lead to years of mockery of the DA’s office and kill your chances at reelection for a purely tabloidesque reason._

McCoy looked at her sideways. “Your ADA came in this morning to recuse himself from those cases on the basis of a romantic relationship with Detective Carisi. He said Detective Carisi filed paperwork at 1PP this morning.”

“He disclosed,” Benson said, surprise washing over her before she realized that _of course he disclosed_ , of course he wasn’t going to fuck up this like she’d fucked up (in his mind) the St. Fabiola’s case in the spring. “But this isn’t about that.” She carefully shut the door behind her and sat in one of the two chairs opposite McCoy. “This is about the embryos recovered from the Lampeters’ lab.”

McCoy stared across the desk at Benson, his eyes wide. “No,” he said.

Benson nodded. “You don't’ have to disclose that you were the donor —”

“I wasn’t Alex Cabot’s boss at the time, just a colleague, so I can’t see how this would affect the case except that you and I would need to be off of it, which isn’t a problem since federal prosecutors are already involved.”

“The newspapers will find a way to mock you.”

“I’m more concerned about where the embryos went than I am about the papers. Tell the federal investigators they can come to me with whatever questions they have. I signed away parental and proprietal rights for you two, but I’m here for whatever I can do to help.”

As Benson thanked McCoy and stood to leave, the thought crossed her mind for the first time that if Carisi by some off chance carried to term, she had a parental claim to the baby. 

“Have you heard from Alex recently?” McCoy asked Benson before she opened the door.

“No.” She pressed her palm to the wall. “Her old cell and landline numbers don’t work anymore.”

“I was worried she’d had to go back into witness protection.”

“So am I.”

She hoped that wherever Cabot was, she was safe, happy, and had made peace with all that had troubled her about working for the Manhattan DA. She hoped all of Cabot’s disappointments in Manhattan hadn’t entirely disillusioned her, because she’d surely seemed on the brink the last time they’d reunited. But whatever happened, Cabot technically had parental rights to any baby born from those embryos too. 

—

Rollins flopped her bag down on the table in front of the security guard at an FBI office in Lower Manhattan. With a baby at home, she wasn’t thrilled about the 11PM phone call requesting her presence at 7AM, but she knew she had to work with the feds if she was going to close the Ariela Dashkin and Julia Madeira cases. 

An agent met her at the security desk. When she’d come in a week earlier to give her statement on what she’d witnessed the night she and Carisi rescued Ariela, they’d given her a room number that she found on her own. She was surprised when a second agent showed up, and the two men led her into the buildings basement to a more secure area, ultimately to an interview room hidden behind a metal door and narrow hallway. 

“We’ll come back for you in fifteen minutes, Detective Rollins,” one of the agents said. 

The agent closed the door. Rollins half-smiled at the familiar face swiveling back and forth in an office chair beside her. 

“Declan,” she said, “how’ve you been?”


	4. Chapter 4

“Declan,” Rollins said, “how’ve you been?”

Murphy stood and they embraced quickly. He dragged over a second office chair from the corner of the otherwise sparse room. Rollins removed her phone from her purse, opened a photo album and wordlessly passed the phone to Murphy, who covered his mouth with one hand while he scrolled through pictures of his daughter with the other hand.

“I wish this was why I was here,” he said. “My god, she’s wonderful. I can’t wait until it’s safe for me to meet her, but Amanda, I’m this close to taking down a major crime syndicate and I’m already blowing it by coming back to headquarters to talk to you.” He kissed his fingers, then touched them to a picture of Jesse on the screen. “I’ve briefed the federal agents, but you need to know about this too.” He handed Rollins’s phone back to her. “I’m asking you to be the bearer of bad news.”

Rollins’s heart raced. The only cases they were working that overlapped with a federal investigation were Dashkin and Madeira, the two women victimized by the Lampeter’s “experiments.”

Murphy reached for a tablet. “I’m showing you a picture of a woman who introduced herself to me as Gabriela, a Romanian who’d acquired explosive devices developed for the FBI, then gave or sold them to Drs. Jonathan and Rachel Lampeter here in New York.”

Rollins squinted at the screen. “That’s Alex Cabot,” she told Murphy. “That is clear-as-day Alex Cabot. What the fuck, Declan?”

“I suspected she was actually American. All I had to do was run this picture through a reverse image search. Turned up ten years of news articles about ADA Cabot. When I saw she worked for SVU, I had to brief my FBI contacts. You need to warn Benson.”

“I do,” Rollins said, drawing out the phrase.

“I’m sorry to put you in this position, but I have to get back before I blow my cover. You can tell Benson the tip came from me, but if anyone else asks —”

“It was from the feds investigating Carisi’s pregnancy.”

“Right.”

“Did you get anything on how to disable the explosive devices?” Rollins asked. “Because if Sonny goes into early labor — and I can’t see how he won’t — he’s screwed.”

“The technology was developed by an outside company contracted, very foolishly if you ask me, by the FBI. It wasn’t finished yet. The company’s dissolved and gone under the radar. The only two of those things in existence are inside your partner, the feds can’t locate the people who designed the technology, and the only other person who knew how to operate the devices is dead.”

Rollins squeezed her eyes shut. “Declan,” she said, almost pleading.

“I’m very deep undercover. I shouldn’t have even come home at all. There’s probably nothing more I can do from my position.”

“Poor Sonny,” she said, half to herself.

_Poor Olivia_ , she thought, entirely to herself.

“You’ll tell Benson?” Murphy asked.

“Yes. I’m headed to the squadroom now.”

They embraced again, Murphy promising her he’d be home in a year or two and that the account he’d opened under an old undercover identity would continue to pay out child support every month. 

When Rollins opened Benson’s office door later that morning, she found Benson sitting behind her desk, staring into space with red eyes and tearstained cheeks. 

The feds must have already told her. 

“Not now, Amanda,” Benson snapped. “Bad time. Come back in an hour.”

“I was just at FBI headquarters.”

“And?” Benson practically barked.

“Okay,” Rollins said, holding up a hand in Benson’s direction and backing away, “I’ll come back later.”

“Wait.”

Rollins tentatively re-entered the office, closing the door completely this time. “The feds, is this about Carisi?” Benson asked. “That obviously concerns me personally now.”

Benson didn’t know about Cabot.

She’d been crying about something else.

“It’s just, they traced the source of the explosives to a crime syndicate in Romania, which connects back to a defunct company here. As of now, nobody knows how to disable it except Jonathan Lampeter, who’s dead, obviously, but at least they made some progress on the investigation. The —”

“Tucker left last night,” Benson admitted, smiling the sort of tight-lipped smile that Rollins had seen on her face before when she was struggling not to cry.

“I’m sorry.”

How could she possibly tell Benson that one of her exes was part of a crime syndicate and was very likely involved in getting Benson’s embryos to the Lampeters _now_ , when she was crying over another soon-to-be ex?

“You want to talk about it?” Rollins asked instead.

“No,” Benson answered with a familiar break in her voice. For a moment, she covered her eyes with one hand.

“I’ll get back to work,” Rollins offered.

Benson looked up at Rollins again. “Amanda.”

“Whatever it is —”

“He couldn’t deal with it anymore, with _me_. He thought we were two tired people who desperately needed to retire and move to a quiet place. Finding out that there’s a one in a million chance that I might take home a second baby in eight months was far too much for him. He doesn’t care that Carisi’s life is in danger, he sees the fact that my embryos were stolen as more of a hindrance to “our” dream of leaving the city than anything else.” She let out a long, desperate sigh. “I thought he was the first one who wasn’t going to let my career get in the way of our relationship. Should have seen this coming when he wouldn’t stop talking about retirement and Pennsylvania.”

Rollins resisted the urge to brush a stray piece of hair from Benson’s forehead, to cup her cheek in one hand, massage the tears off her face with her thumb, and promise her that everything was going to be okay even though it wasn’t.

Within two weeks, Benson and Tucker were over for good. Benson went about her days mechanically, still in shock that yet _another_ relationship could end so abruptly. Rollins hoped that someone from the feds would tell Benson about Alex Cabot’s links to the Lampeters, but when two months went by and the feds didn’t say a word, Rollins realized that because the explosive devices hadn’t been relevant to what happened to either Ariela Dashkin or Julia Madeira, they were never going to tell Benson anything. Murphy had asked to see Rollins so that Benson would be informed; the feds weren’t planning to tell her otherwise. 

“She’s in bad shape, isn’t she?” a worried Barba asked Rollins one afternoon while they were in trial prep. 

“She’s doing her job, doing it well as always. Maybe you should work out what’s between you. She needs friends.”

“Hm,” was all Barba said as he shuffled around near the witness stand.

When an announcement for the captain promotional exam circulated the week before Thanksgiving, Rollins urged Benson to sign up to take the test. “This is what you want, isn’t it?” Rollins said. “Captain Olivia Benson, who revolutionized Manhattan SVU and rape kit testing and special victims investigations across the country.”

It was the first time in two months she’d seen Benson smile. After that, her spirits lifted a bit, even as they all worried about Carisi.

Rollins promised herself she’d tell Benson about Cabot after the exam, which was scheduled for the first week of February. But even that wasn’t good enough, Rollins knew deep down, because what if Cabot contacted Benson under false pretenses?

But if the feds thought that was a possibility, they’d have already warned Benson, wouldn’t they?

_But_ , on the other hand — Rollins had been through four or five hands by this point — Cabot had violated Benson’s trust and body autonomy by giving the embryos to the Lampeters after she’d convinced Benson not to try to get pregnant, to donate the embryos for research instead.

She wanted to protect Benson from people who’d lied to her, from one person in particular who’d pulled a complete heel turn, who’d betrayed her in some of the most bizarre, the _worst_ possible ways, but she wasn’t sure how to do that.

—

By the week before Christmas, Carisi was still pregnant, carrying a growing fetus with a detectable heartbeat, and also two explosive devices that neither the FBI nor the living Dr. Lampeter had been able to turn off or safely remove. Unlike in a standard pregnancy, the area _above_ Carisi’s bellybutton had started to expand, the skin stretching as the artificial uterus expanded exactly as its biological counterpart would have.

Carisi was exhausted. He worried every day about the ticking time bombs that held the uterus in place. Benson had offered to take the baby home if there was a baby, but they all knew there was maybe only a 50/50 chance he’d survive the pregnancy regardless of how far he made it. He found himself crying a lot when he was home — in Barba’s apartment, rather — by himself.

He’d had to come out to his family, not quite on his own terms, but at least there was Bella to explain to them that, yes, Sonny was bisexual and in a relationship with a man, and that if they wanted to understand that beyond what they saw on tv sitcoms or heard on talk radio and at the pinochle table, they could read more online or perhaps have a non-interview-like conversation with Sonny himself. And they were trying, his parents and sisters, they were, but he was exhausted.

The only place he found any real comfort was in Barba’s arms. 

Barba was still a tough-as-nails prosecutor, a smirking but somewhat delightful asshole half the time, but when Barba loved someone, he was a puppy. That was something Carisi had suspected not long after he’d first met Barba. His evidence for that was how protective Barba was of people in his inner circle, and the concern that flashed in his eyes whenever any of the squad was in danger.

One Saturday morning in mid-December, Carisi fell asleep on the couch with his head on Barba’s shoulder because he hadn’t slept at all the night before. When he woke up, Barba’s fingers were running through his hair, gently massaging his scalp. Barba’s eyes were red.

Carisi was hungry. For the first time in weeks — months — he craved a really good other-side-of-the-Verrazano sandwich, like meatball parmigiana or chicken cutlet with bacon and bright yellow cheddar and fried onions, or roast beef with swiss and gravy and more onions, fries smothered in mozzarella —

“Sonny?” Barba said, that familiar concern crossing his face again.

“I’m fine. Just hungry. Starving. Finally.”

“Great. What do you want to eat?”

“There’s this deli on Staten Island, Richmondland Express, that has really good heros. Check the ferry schedule and I’ll introduce you to Staten Island sandwich culture.”

“I’m intrigued, but are you allowed on the ferry?” 

“I’ll wear my vest.”

“But are you _allowed_ —”

“I went by ferry to see Gina two weeks ago. Yes, I was cleared by NYPD and Homeland Security. Don’t kill my buzz, Rafael.”

Six months ago, he probably wouldn’t have been up for bringing his late-forties Harvard-grad lawyer boyfriend to the Richmondland Express Deli, but with his exhaustion and fear came a newfound fuck-it-ness, a desire to say _fuck it_ to all the bridge-and-tunnel judgments he’d internalized. If they asked too many questions, if they asked stupid, hurtful questions, that was on them. That was their idiocy, their insecurity, _their_ attention seeking, not his.

“Hey, Raf?” Carisi said a little sheepishly when he got out of the shower. “Can I borrow one of your sweatshirts?”

“Sure. I thought we —” Barba stopped, laughed to himself, and clicked his tongue at Carisi. “Is this because your shirts don’t fit over your” — he waved a hand up and down, indicating the space between Carisi’s ribs and hips — “anymore?”

“I love your belly,” Carisi teased, reaching out to pat Barba’s. “And I can’t borrow anything else because only the sweatshirts are long enough to fit me.”

“You’re also calling me … short?”

“You’re not short. You’re, what, 5-foot-10.”

“Yes,” Barba said, narrowing his eyes.

“I’d never call you short. Never. Never, ever.”

“I’m only letting that slide because this is the first time I’ve seen you happy since September.” He threw a sweatshirt in Carisi’s direction. “We’ll get you a few bigger shirts you can wear to work.”

“Right now, all I want is one really good sandwich.”

Within two hours, they were off the ferry and at the counter of Richmondland Express, a sandwich shop a few blocks off a main boulevard, near a residential street endcapped by churches. “No weird additions or subtractions,” Carisi warned.

“Sonny, you assume my tastes are a lot more refined than they actually are.”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I’ve seen you eat pretzels out of the big plastic jar in the squadroom that’s allegedly been in there since John Munch was sergeant.” He smirked at Barba, then shouted, “Albert, how ya been?” at the gray-haired man behind the counter.

“Sonny! We were all so worried about you. Me and Rosalie, our hearts were breaking when we read about you in the papers.”

Carisi leaned in, one elbow on the counter. “You tell Rosalie and everybody I’m gonna be fine.” A lie, he figured, but he didn’t want anybody grieving for him while he was still alive. “Albert, this is Rafael.”

“Pleasure’s mine,” Albert said, reaching over the counter to shake Barba’s hand. “Dom Sr. told me you found somebody, finally, after all this time. You’ll invite us to the wedding, me and Rosalie? We’ve never been to a —”

“Don’t get so far ahead of yourself,” Carisi said.

“You’re almost forty.” Albert tipped his head in Barba’s direction. “Make an honest man out of our Sonny, all right, Rafael?” Smiling, he moved to the side to help a customer waiting in line. 

With his hands shoved into the pockets of his puffy coat, Barba looked up at the menu that hadn’t changed since maybe 1982. “What do they mean by “gravy”?” Barba said to Carisi. “And does _everything_ have gravy on it?”

Carisi elbowed Barba. “Brown gravy, and some of the chicken heros don’t have it. Hey, Albert, you wanna get us an order of waffle fries with mozzarella?” 

“Gravy?” Albert asked.

“Yeah. I’ll take an Old Town, and Rafael will have a Goethals.”

“A wh—” Barba stammered, looking up at the menu.

“Steak, cheese, onions, and gravy. You like steak.”

“Sure.” Barba kept his hands in his pockets and followed Carisi to a table in the back of the narrow shop.

“Mine is chicken with mozzarella, onions, peppers, and —”

“Gravy,” Barba guessed. 

“Gravy. And you get to share a bed with me while I digest all this.”

“Just be careful with —”

“Human, uh, body gas can’t hurt me. The docs figured that out already. Thank God, right?”

Barba smiled across the table at Carisi.

On the trip home, they huddled together on an upper deck of the ferry, watching the sun set on the way home. “You digesting okay?” Carisi asked Barba.

“Yes,” Barba said with a laugh. “You?”

“Better than I thought I would.”

“Good.”

“I wonder what stage of grief this is. Probably just another part of denial.”

“Might be acceptance,” Barba said, swallowing hard. “But you’ll be —”

“You don’t have to lie to me. I know they have no idea how to remove the uterus or deliver the baby safely. I know if they have to open me up before 36 weeks, I’m fucked. I don’t want to worry anybody else, though.”

Barba rubbed a hand over the back of Carisi’s coat. “You’ll make it through, ADA Carisi.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I don’t want to think about something I worked so hard for when I don’t know how much time I’ve got. I look out here, and it’s not even the ocean, just New York Harbor, and I want to scream at my younger self that he’d better stop wringing his hands and he’d better tell everybody — everyone who has something to say about what he wants — to just fuck the hell off.” He grasped the railing with gloved hands. “Sorry. Now I’m the one killing the buzz.”

“You’re not,” Barba assured him. 

“What are we going to do?” Carisi asked vaguely, desperately. 

“Dream about the future.”

“Oh, come on.”

“The future where you’re SVU’s new ADA, and we’re married, and everyone is happy and safe.”

“Huh,” Carisi said, still leaning against the railing, “I’ve never known you to be so much of an optimist.”

“I am for you.” Barba reached over and pressed their gloved hands together. “For you.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nope, I have no idea why I'm still writing this.

“It’s … remarkable,” Dr. Rachel Lampeter said, her lips parting in an expression of wonder as she stared through the window in Benson’s office that faced the interrogation room. Inside, Carisi stood near the table, accompanied by Rollins, protected from Rachel’s gaze by the two-way mirror. 

Now a few weeks into his second trimester, he was legitimately _showing_. 

The team of doctors assembled by Mercy Hospital and the feds put his chances for survival at maybe 50/50 if no one figured out how to disable the two explosive devices. 

Benson stood next to Rachel, with a corrections officer from the upstate prison where she’d been held without bail since September leaning against the door. Fin sat behind Benson’s desk, while two federal agents kept their eyes on Rachel from the other side of the office. Rachel’s lawyer and a federal prosecutor sitting near the window that faced the squadroom meant that the lieutenant’s office was a very crowded house that afternoon. 

They were letting Rachel observe, from a distance, how Carisi’s pregnancy was progressing in exchange for her confession that she, not Jonathan, was the one who’d acquired the explosive devices. 

Laura Cantor, the federal prosecutor, had been on the verge of finalizing a plea deal with Rachel and her lawyer when an FBI agent informed her that it was Rachel herself, not Jonathan, who’d reached out to a contact in Romania to get the devices. An undercover operative who needed to remain undercover had proof of this, but that proof did them no good if the u/c couldn’t come forward. They needed a confession from Rachel, because if she had links to international criminal organizations, the original offer of 10 to 15 years wasn’t enough. 

Rachel promised to talk under two conditions: first, that she’d get to see how Carisi’s pregnancy was progressing, and second, that she would explain the details of what she’d done — _confess_ to Olivia Benson, and only Olivia Benson. 

“That’s a problem,” Cantor originally told Rachel and the federal investigators. “Carisi works for Benson. Rachel can’t talk to her.”

“I want to talk to Olivia Benson,” Rachel insisted. And so, the federal team very reluctantly arranged a meeting.

Rollins led Carisi out of the interrogation room through a separate exit, and Benson entered from her office, accompanied by Rachel. “No,” Rachel told her lawyer when he went to follow her inside, “you can watch from out there. I don’t want anyone interrupting me.”

Rachel took a seat at the table. Benson shut the door and sat opposite Rachel, folding her hands in front of her as she waited for the now-unlicensed doctor to talk. 

“Yes,” Rachel said, “I’m the one who contacted Gabriela to get the devices.”

Benson was sure that Rachel’s lawyer was cringing on the other side of the mirror.

“But Gabriela isn’t who all of you seem to think she is,” Rachel continued.

Benson had no idea who Gabriela was. The name had never come up in their investigations into how the Lampeters were connected to the assault on Julia Madeira.

“She rescues women from abusive relationships. Jonathan never hit me, but he had control of everything — starting with the title to our house, then the lab, then our finances, then my patents. It was a slow creep over ten years. Before that, I was working on my own. No one else believed I could go from a bright, independent surgeon to someone without a penny or a patent to her name in just ten years, especially if he never hit me. They said it was my fault, my own stupidity, my own bad decisions, everyone except for the woman who referred me to Gabriela.”

“I believe you,” Benson said.

“You give up bits and pieces for the sake of negotiation until you wake up one morning and realize you’ve given everything away to a man who only loved you because you could make his dream of impregnating un-impregnable things possible. One of the patients who Dr. Nord sent to me saw what was happening, and gave me Gabriela’s name. Gabriela believed me, too.”

“And so do I.” She did. In her two decades at SVU, she’d seen at least a dozen iterations of the same situation, with at least a hundred different women. 

“Jonathan promised I could leave him, that he’d put some money in a bank account for me and give me back at least one of my patents if I found him something that would force a male-sex patient to retain a pregnancy. I said we should just ask one of the lab assistants to do it, we could pay him well since Jonathan was always flushing money down the toilet for this ridiculous venture as it was, but he said no, the assistant would chicken out as soon as the cramps and morning sickness hit.”

“You could have come to us, here, first.”

“What charges could you have possibly filed? He stole my life’s work. I gave up surgery, and all my patents on the artificial uterus, for _him_. You asked me back in September why my hands shake.”

“They shake because of him,” Benson guessed.

“Gabriela got me the two devices — she’s very well-connected, very secretive — but I still don’t think I should get more than 10 to 15 years. She had connections in Canada, that’s how the devices got to me, I can tell you that much if it helps.” 

“I’ll talk to the feds.”

“When she found out I lived in Manhattan, Gabriela asked me if I’d spoken to you. But then she told me to forget it, that you could only press charges in very specific circumstances, that’s why the legal system screws over so many people in my position. Bankrupt, no property to my name, not even what should be my intellectual property.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Benson said, a genuine promise.

After Rachel was put back in the van that would return her to the women’s prison upstate, Benson met with the federal agents. Her first question: “Who’s Gabriela?”

“That’s not relevant to the city’s investigation,” one of the agents told her.

“What if there’s a connection between her and what happened to Ariela Dashkin? She was the reason Carisi went into that surgical suite in the first place.”

“There’s no connection,” the second agent said. “Trust us.”

“Is there a reason you don’t want to tell me?”

“It’s unrelated to Ms. Dashkin. Ms. Madeira, too. In fact, Gabriela is connected to a much larger undercover investigation.”

“Bigger fish,” Benson said, rolling her eyes.

“Much bigger fish,” the agent echoed.

_Bigger fish in organized crime syndicates in Eastern Europe_ , Benson thought. Then, suddenly, “Who’s the undercover operative?”

Back in October, Rollins had mentioned that Declan Murphy had briefly been back to New York, where he saw pictures of Jesse. She’d clearly misspoken, but Benson had assumed her quick speech and nervous gestures meant that no one was supposed to know that Murphy had been back. 

“That information is _well_ outside the scope of your investigation.”

“Right. Sure. I hope you’ll keep me informed of any new developments that affect my cases. I told your prosecutor I’ll be on her back about cutting Rachel a deal.”

“I’m sure she’ll be thrilled. Take care, Lieutenant.”

As soon as the agents were out the door, Benson stormed towards Rollins’s desk. “Rollins,” she snapped, “my office, _now_.”

Rollins followed Benson to her office, and Benson shut the door firmly behind her. “What do you know about this woman Gabriela who got the explosive devices for Dr. Lampeter?” Benson asked, folding her arms and staring Rollins down.

Rollins’s first instinct was to feign confusion, but if Benson had already figured out that the reason she’d met with Murphy a few weeks after Carisi was attacked had nothing to do with Jesse, it was too late for pretending.

“You told me Murphy came to visit in early October, to check in on Jesse. Why were you meeting with him?”

Rollins looked down at her feet. “He wanted me to tell you something,” she admitted, “and I didn’t, ‘cause —”

“An undercover operative asked you to pass information on to me, your commanding officer, and you _didn’t_?”

“—‘cause I didn’t want to break your heart, Liv, okay, you don’t need any more heartbreak.”

“What?” was all Benson could come up with. She moved three steps closer to Rollins. “What could possibly —”

“It doesn’t have anything at all to do with the Dashkin or Madeira cases. Otherwise the feds would have said something. Tucker had just left you the night before. I was going to tell you, but I know what it’s like to get one heartbreak on right top of another, and I know you’ve been through that too, so —”

“What didn’t you tell me, Detective Rollins?”

Her expression flattened. “Gabriela, the woman who got the explosive devices for Dr. Lampeter, who works with an organized crime syndicate, is former ADA Alex Cabot.”

“You’re —” Benson wanted to say _you’re lying,_ or _you’re bullshitting me_ , or _you’re off my squad_ , but when she considered Rollins’s claim for a split second, every part of it — why someone would help an emotionally and financially abused doctor acquire something dangerous and illegal, why Benson’s embryos were in the Lampeters’ lab — every part of it except the organized crime syndicate made a lot of sense.

“Go home, Amanda,” she said instead.

“If you were in any danger, the feds would have —”

“Murphy wanted me to know,” she said, anger seething through her teeth. “Go home before I write you up. Go home before I have you transferred.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Rollins said, not an ounce of sarcasm in the honorific.

Benson didn’t know what to do with her anger. She paced her office floor for a while, hoping it would dissipate, knowing it was too soon, not the right frame of mind, for her to make any rash decisions about Rollins. She was furious that Rollins had kept Cabot’s involvement — Cabot’s secret identity — Cabot’s _downfall_ — from her for more than three months, but maybe her fury was best directed at Cabot herself.

Alex had betrayed her.

She must have been on the brink the second time they’d reunited, when her desk was full of cases where victims couldn’t get justice because there were always bigger fish to fry. They’d shared that outrage over justice-subsumed-by-bigger-fish for many years. And now, somehow, Cabot had decided that the only way to fight those injustices was to become one of those bigger fish herself.

At the end of the day, Benson stopped by Forlini’s. She hadn’t been to the bar there in months for no other reason than avoiding Barba, who remained disappointed in her because she’d nearly screwed over the St. Fabiola’s case when she’d failed to disclose her relationship with Tucker.

Barba was there, hunched over his tumbler of scotch.

“Any room for an old friend?” she asked, taking the seat next to his.

He let out a breathy laugh. “Always.”

She ordered a glass of Cabernet, and a long silence ensued. “How have you been?” she asked.

“Well.” Now a more full, if ironic, laugh came from him. “My boyfriend’s eighteen weeks pregnant, how about you?”

She patted him on the back and took a languid, slow sip of wine. “I’ve been betrayed by an old friend.”

He looked at her sideways and swallowed hard, as if he was trying to suppress a million snide comments.

“I suppose I wasn’t a very good friend last year, Rafa.”

“No,” he said into his tumbler of scotch, “no, I mean, that’s not true at all. I was an asshole for how I reacted.”

“You were reasonable. You were right to be angry with me. Ed and I should have disclosed well before the shit hit the fan with St. Fabiola’s. He was IAB. We should have known. We went about the whole thing stupidly.”

“Listen to me for a second. That’s not entirely why I was angry.” 

“Then why —” Her shoulders dropped and, hanging her head, she whispered, “Rafa.”

“I was a spectacular asshole to treat you like you’d done me wrong when I’d never even asked you if you’d been interested in pursuing a relationship.”

“Rafa,” she repeated, her face now buried in her arms, which were folded atop the bar. “I didn’t see it.”

“That wasn’t on you. I was the asshole. When Sonny and I got together, _really_ got together, I remembered that you can’t build a relationship on one-sided private pining, and you certainly can’t get _angry_ with your friends when —”

“Please,” Benson said, her head still down on the bar, “Carisi’s been “one-sided private pining” for you since he started at SVU.”

“But he never got angry with me the way I did with you.”

She slowly lifted her head. “Are you saying you were wrong?”

“Yes.” He licked his lower lip. “I was wrong.”

“Can I record that and set it as my ringtone?”

“Of course.” He dipped his head to catch her gaze. “You want to talk?”

“I can’t,” she said, her voice hoarse. “Even if all of last year hadn’t happened, I couldn’t tell you.” She turned to look behind her. “It’s part of a federal, probably international, investigation.”

“I’m sorry. Whatever it is, you deserve more than you’ve been dealt. A lot more.”

“You know what?” Benson said, placing a cash tip underneath her glass. “I’m going to go home, hug my son, and thank God for all the bullets, both literal and figurative, I’ve dodged in my life.”

“I really am sorry, Liv, for so much.”

“I forgive you. Let’s get together soon, you, me, and Carisi, all right?”

“Sounds good.”

The onetime friends embraced and, with little hope for the future of anything other than their repaired friendship, said good night.

—

Barba came home around 8 o’clock to find Carisi asleep on the couch in front of the tv, which was emitting a low hum from the police procedural he’d been watching. (“Unrealistic competence porn,” he’d called it once.) He smiled at the sight of Carisi sleeping peacefully, an unusual occurrence these last four months. 

He left his briefcase on the kitchen table and went into the bedroom to strip down to boxers and a T-shirt, then found a small sliver of couch in which to plant himself. Even with his legs curled in, Carisi took up most of the couch, but in the moment, Barba didn’t mind.

Carisi blinked himself awake. “I’m so tired,” he said. “Sorry.”

“There’s nothing to apologize for.”

Carisi sat up slowly, struggling to avoid the muscle pulls that one of the hormones was rendering more and more frequent. Indicating his swollen abdomen, he shrugged and let out a “well.”

“This is not in any way your fault. If it happened to someone else, what would you tell them?”

“I would tell them it’s not their fault, but look, from my point of view, I caused a lot of trouble.”

“How?” Barba asked.

Carisi hunched forward, pressing his elbows into his thighs. “You wanna know how the Lampeters got a hold of Benson’s embryos? This stays between you and me. I’m not even supposed to know.”

“You shouldn’t investigate your own case.”

“What’re they going to do, discipline me, kill my pension when I’ve only got five months left to live?”

“Don’t say that,” Barba said sharply, swallowing the lump in his throat. 

“You and I both know the odds are all my important organs get blown up. I read the medical reports.”

“Sonny, you —”

“Just listen. One of the agents told me. The link between the Lampeters and this Eastern European crime syndicate that supplied them with what they needed was Alex Cabot, the former ADA.”

“How is that —” Barba started to say, cutting himself off when he recalled Benson’s words: _I’ve been betrayed by an old friend._

“Your office will be handling and probably losing appeals for the next ten years when news of what Cabot’s doing these days comes out.”

“We’ll be fine with you on board as the new SVU ADA.”

“I don’t know why you keep saying that when —”

“The doctors are working hard to keep you safe. You know that. Where’s that little bit of optimism you had last month?”

“That wasn’t so much optimism as fuck-it-ism.” He took Barba’s hand. “Let’s go to City Hall and get married next week.”

Barba kissed Carisi’s temple. “I’m not letting you make snap decisions on nothing but fear and insomnia.”

“Also pizza, garlic knots, french fries, and anger.”

“That too.” Winding his fingers tightly between Carisi’s, he lifted the detective’s hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “Besides, I expect a formal marriage proposal.”

“If I get down on one knee, I’m never getting back up off the floor.”

“I mean after this is all over and done with.”

“It’s 50-50 at best that I’ll still be here when this is all over and done with.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“That’s not pessimism, Raf, it’s literally what the doctors say is going to happen if nobody figures out how to disable the goddamn explosive devices. But I’ll tell you something, if Cabot ever sets foot in New York again, I want to be the one to arrest her. If I figure out a way to get in touch with her, I’ll get her here myself, corner her, and place her under arrest.”

Barba’s eyes were wide.

“What?” Carisi asked, rising from the couch.

“Nothing.”

“You wanna say, “don’t you dare.””

Barba stood. “C’mere,” he said, drawing Carisi into an embrace. “That’s exactly what I want to say, but I’m assuming Cabot is somewhere nowhere near New York, so you are welcome to fantasize about confronting her as much as you want.”

“How generous.”

Barba turned his eyes upward to look at Carisi. “Sonny,” he said, his tongue darting out to lick his lower lip. 

“What?” 

“Don’t leave me.” 

Carisi winced. “That depends on how quickly the feds and the doctors figure out —”

“I know.”

“Even though it’s not entirely up to me, I will try my best not to leave you.”

Together, they walked off to the bedroom.


	6. Chapter 6

Rollins had just put Jesse down for the night when someone rang her doorbell from the lobby downstairs. “What?” Rollins said loudly into the speaker.

“Amanda, it’s Liv.”

Rollins rolled her eyes as she smashed her thumb into the buzzer. She peeked into Jesse’s room to make sure she was still asleep in her crib before opening the door for Benson.

“Come to yell at me some more?” she asked, pressing her shoulder into the doorframe. 

“I came by late because —”

“‘Cause I’ve called in sick the last two days and you’re severely understaffed? Sorry, can’t help you there. I’m coming in tomorrow so I can put in for a transfer to forensics.” She cleared a path for Benson to come in. “So, anything else I can help you with?”

“I wanted to ask you off duty, off the record, as your friend rather than your commanding officer, why you waited more than three months to tell me something that Declan Murphy wanted me to know?”

Rollins folded her arms, keeping her eyes turned away from Benson, towards the small dining table set up outside the narrow kitchen. “You don’t believe me,” she said, letting out a small laugh through her nostrils, “but I really didn’t want to break your heart.”

Benson took five steps forward, closing the space between them.

“You look like you wanna push me up against a wall,” Rollins smirked, “but in a good way.”

“Amanda, I’m your _boss_.”

“I’m putting in for a transfer tomorrow.”

“No you’re not.”

“Paperwork’s all filled out, sitting right there in the top drawer of my desk.” 

“Yeah?” Now Benson was even closer, her breath very nearly on Rollins’s cheek, much like that first time they’d been together more than four years ago. She dipped her head, her lips micrometers from Rollins’s neck, and said softly, “this is a bad idea.”

She kissed Rollins’s neck anyway, tonguing her skin and adding pressure before dragging her lips upward towards Rollins’s jawline. “You need more?” Benson asked, her hands trailing down Rollins’s sides, over the waistband of her pajama pants.

“I need it, momma, c’mon,” Rollins groaned. She slid her hands over Benson’s jeans, over her ass, and pulled her close in the hope of gaining friction. 

When Rollins lifted her T-shirt over her head, revealing her breasts to Benson, the lieutenant backed her up towards a bare wall near the makeshift dining room.

Benson kissed the tops of Rollins’s breasts. “They’re not hurting anymore,” Rollins said, “so go for it.”

Rollins hissed “yes” as Benson pulled a nipple into her mouth and hooked her thumbs into the waistband of the younger woman’s pajama pants, easing them down. Benson rubbed the heel of her hand against Rollins and whispered once again, “this is a bad idea.”

“Liv, don’t stop, don’t stop, momma.” She moved to guide Benson’s hand, remembering that Benson didn’t like her wrists grabbed, so she let fingers guide fingers.

“Tell me what you want, Amanda,” Benson said breathlessly. “Tell me what you want.”

She’d have told Benson she wanted one of her gorgeous, delicious breasts in her mouth too, but she was speechless, literally weak in the knees under the ministrations of her hand and her intense stare. “Fingers,” was all she was able to groan out, “more.”

“Yeah, Amanda? That’s what you want?” Benson widened her stance, keeping Rollins’s back pressed to the wall. Brown eyes dark but simultaneously full of fire, she slid one finger into Rollins, “Like that?”

“More,” Rollins begged.

Benson added a second finger. “You look so pretty like this.”

Rollins found herself whispering “fuck me, fuck me” as Benson curled two fingers inside her, pressing on her clit with her thumb, rubbing — incessantly, perfectly — until Rollins spasmed around Benson’s fingers, dripping wet, Rollins groaning through gritted teeth, Benson muttering “give it to me, Amanda, show me how you like it,” Rollins breathing out “yes, momma, yes,” through her orgasm.

Rollins leaned forward to kiss Benson, both of them allowing the kiss to linger, almost sweetly. “Hey,” Rollins said, dragging a hand upward to cup Benson’s breast through her shirt and bra, “c’mon to the bedroom.” She stepped out of her pajama pants entirely so that she stood fully naked, cradling the back of Benson’s head in one of her hands. “I remember what you like. You can sit on the end of the bed and I’ll suck on all your sensitive spots, one at a time, until you’re —”

“Not tonight,” Benson said, her intense looks now supplanted by a sad smile. “This was a bad idea. I’m your boss.”

“Not like we both haven’t been down that road before.”

“Amanda.” She touched the side of Rollins’s face. “This was just —”

“Your broken heart.”

Benson removed her and from Rollins’s face and retreated from the wall, from Rollins. “I’ve been there,” Rollins said, pulling her shirt over hear head, leaving the pajama pants discarded on the floor. “When it’s one heartbreak on top of another, when it won’t let up, when it feels like you’re the only one, when you _want_ to feel like you’re the only one —”

“Amanda.” Benson finally locked eyes with the detective again. “You’d leave me too. Or we’d have to end it for the same reasons we ended it the first time. Or you’d fall in love with someone else. Or you’d get so fed up with the justice system that you’d join an international crime syndicate.”

“C’mere,” Rollins said, reaching her arms out to Benson, “c’mere.”

“You don’t know,” Benson said. She was clearly struggling to hold back tears, and her voice was reduced to a whisper not so much because she was trying not to wake up Jesse but because she couldn’t project beyond the sadness, the desperation lodged in her chest. “Ed was supposed to be the safe one, the one who wouldn’t leave.”

Rollins settled her hands on Benson’s hips. “You coulda just retired and gone to Pennsylvania with him.”

“Sure, and give up the little I have left, for what? For the only person I thought wouldn’t leave me?” Benson pushed Rollins’s hands off her hips, and Rollins retreated this time. “You don’t have to transfer. I understand why you did what you did. I don’t approve, I don’t agree, but I understand. We can forget all about it tonight and get back to work if you want, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart for the lines I crossed tonight.”

“If I thought you were crossing lines, I’d have let you know, and you, being who you are, would have stopped.”

Benson was already at the door, putting her coat back on. “I’ll see you Monday.”

“And if you need a friend — or something a little more, or something a lot more — I’m here for you, whatever you need.”

“Thank you,” Benson said, averting her eyes and looking at the floor on her way to the elevator opposite Rollins’s apartment. 

Rollins closed the door.

She locked the deadbolt, checked on Jesse, and climbed into bed. The moment she laid her head down on the pillow, she heard a knock on the door. She was surprised to see Benson through the peephole.

“Can you get a last-minute late night sitter, a neighbor or someone?” Benson asked, holding up her smartphone with one hand. “Barba called when I got off the elevator. Carisi didn’t come home tonight. The feds just went out looking for him.”

—

After his second trimester started and the doctors made it fairly clear that the Lampeters’ experiment was _working_ , Carisi discovered that the feds and Interpol were not doing everything they could to determine how to disable the explosive devices inside him. They were frying a much bigger fish — Balasz Zurzavar, the head of an Eastern European crime syndicate that acquired and distributed weapons developed for government agencies — and had invested too much time and money in an agent who was deep enough undercover to take the entire syndicate down. The doctors had given Carisi a 50/50 chance at surviving this ordeal. By Christmas Eve, the first time he brought Barba to his parents’ house, Carisi’s off-the-book investigations into his own assault told him that his chances were nowhere near 50/50, that the feds, the Romanian and Hungarian police forces, and Interpol were interested in his plight only inasmuch as it could help them catch Zurzavar.

His choices were to do nothing and probably not survive, or to do something and legitimately increase his chance of survival to 50/50.

So in January, a few days after he discovered that Gabriela, the woman who’d joined Zurzavar’s organization so that she could acquire the explosive devices was in fact former ADA Alexandra Cabot, he contacted the patient who’d told Rachel Lampeter about Gabriela. He’d found her name in a file he wasn’t supposed to be looking at. He would get in trouble with NYPD, sure, but what did it matter now?

Worse, he had his sister Bella call the number. He gave her a script, having her pose as an abused wife who couldn’t get a restraining order against the husband who’d unlawfully imprisoned her in their home at least three times a year. But when Carisi went to meet Gabriela at the address the woman on the phone had given to Bella, he was greeted with the barrel of a pistol against his temple.

“Talk,” the man on the other side of the pistol said.

The warehouse basement in Maspeth, just outside the Midtown Tunnel — he kept reminding himself of where he was so he’d be an impeccable witness if he survived — was dark, and he couldn’t see beyond the shadows.

“Who sent you?” the man barked, and a second shadow ran up and snatched the weapon from Carisi’s holster just as he reached for it. Carisi’s limbs shook as the barrel pressed further into his skin. 

He hadn’t told anyone where he was going. But these people — there were at least three, the footsteps suggested — wanted information, he knew that right away because of the man’s immediate demand for him to _talk_. He didn’t know how long he had, but at least he might be able to stall. 

“The feds,” he lied, hoping to protect the patient who’d connected Rachel with Gabriela. “They know about your warehouse here.” He prayed the lie would lead them to believe that since the feds knew about the warehouse anyway, there was no need for them to kill him. 

“What’s your business with us, then?”

“With Gabriela,” Carisi corrected. “I need to know how to disable the explosive devices inside me.”

“She doesn’t know,” the man said, enunciating each word harshly. 

“Let him go,” came a woman’s voice from the back of the basement. An Eastern European accent, probably a fake one, Carisi observed. “What can get from us if their federal government already knows where we are?”

“Have you and your boss gone stupid?”

“Let him go!” the woman ordered.

In response, the man placed his finger on the trigger. Carisi couldn’t see the gun, even as his eyes adjusted somewhat to the dark, but he could feel the shift. 

“If I knew, I’d have told you,” Gabriela/Cabot said. “The instructions were delivered directly to Jonathan Lampeter. Let him go. He wants something we don’t have and we want something he doesn’t have.”

“You’re going soft,” the man said.

“He’s pregnant. He’s four months pregnant. Detective,” she said, addressing Carisi directly but not taking a single step forward, “neither Rachel Lampeter nor I thought the pregnancy would take. Her artificial uterus was never intended for this. We thought the surgeons would remove the devices and the uterus fairly easily from whoever Jonathan implanted them in.”

“You were trying to cut Rachel’s losses, get her out of there.”

“Detective, if _you_ want to get out of here I’d recommend you —”

The man cut Gabriela/Cabot off when he hit the side of Carisi’s face with the pistol, then pointed it at his head again. Carisi heard a gunshot and felt something wet on his forehead, and for a split second he thought he was dead.

_Commotion. Boots against a stone floor. Flashlights. A dead man on the ground. Lieutenant Olivia Benson lowering her gun._

Benson ran to him, not to Cabot, who was being placed under arrest by federal agents. “You’re okay, Sonny,” she said. “Stay where you are. There’s a bus outside. Let the medics come get you.”

Rollins descended the steps next. She knelt down and hugged Carisi, careful to avoid his swollen cheek which he was sure was already darkened with bruises. “We’ve got to let the medics come get you, but Barba’s waiting outside. We told him this was no place for a civilian, but you know Barba.”

Carisi heard their words, but he couldn’t get any response to come to his lips. Benson and Rollins followed him as the medics led him outside, where he met Barba at the ambulance.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Barba said, a little tearful, a little terrified, a little furious. He was standing while Carisi sat on the low stretcher. “Other than the fact that you just heroically caught Cabot for the feds, what the hell were you thinking?”

Carisi, still unable to speak, leaned his head against Barba’s stomach. He felt tears spring to his eyes. “I’m getting your dress shirt wet,” were his first words, a hoarse apology, almost a non-sequitur.

Barba pet his hair. “It’s okay,” he promised. “You’re safe.”

“For how long,” Carisi said flatly, not bothering to raise his voice at the end of the question. “Cabot doesn’t know how to disable the devices. I’m sure of that because she was really trying to convince the guy to let me go.”

“You’re safe,” was all Barba said. “I love you.” He kept one arm around Carisi’s shoulders as sirens wailed in the distance and Carisi wept.

—-

The call came in at 6 on a Saturday evening, as Benson was setting a pizza down on the dining table for her and Noah. 

Rachel Lampeter had begged the warden to let her talk to Benson.

“Lieutenant Benson,” she said, “I needed this to go through you, since you’re the only one I trust. Carisi’s in more trouble than we thought. This morning — and I’m telling you because you’re the only one who’ll believe I was so exhausted from all those years of dealing with Jonathan that I didn’t think of it until this morning — I realized that my stupid husband didn’t factor something important in when he set up those devices. We measure forty weeks of pregnancy from the last menstrual period, not date of conception or implantation. That’s an additional two weeks. Jonathan also didn’t factor in the two to ten days implantation takes in a biological uterus. Full term is 37 to 40 weeks. That means Carisi’s going to reach full term, probably go into active labor, with one to two weeks still left on the clock.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is so off-the-wall. 
> 
> Ridiculous amount of ANGST in this chapter.

A few days after Benson and Rollins rescued him from the basement death trap that Zurzavar’s American associates had set him to walk into, Carisi woke up in Barba’s bed, his cheek and jaw still throbbing with bruises from the pistol-whipping he’d taken, and blinked himself awake to find Barba standing over him, inches from the edge of the bed. Barba’s head was tilted, his eyes wide with concern. He’d been watching Carisi sleep.

Barba’s eyes revealed all his capacity for empathy, all his worries, all his fears.

“What’s wrong?” Carisi asked, rolling onto his side.

Barba’s eyes flared wide, conveying the message _everything_. 

“Huh,” Carisi said, understanding even though Barba hadn’t said a word.

Barba sat on the bed. “I don’t know what to tell you.” He licked his lower lip. “I don’t. I can’t. I —”

“The reason I went in there in the first place was I knew the feds weren’t doing enough to figure out how to disarm the devices, ‘cause getting their hands on Zurzavar was more important.”

“You still want to get married, Sonny?” Barba asked, rubbing Carisi’s shoulder through his T-shirt, then leaning down to kiss the side of his mouth. 

Carisi closed his eyes, resisting the sobs welling up in his throat.

“Yeah. I do. You wanna tell me why you’re now sure we’re in a rush?”

Barba took one of Carisi’s hands in both of his and flashed him a sad smile, almost a smirk. 

“How bad?” Carisi asked. Then, a little more demanding when Barba didn’t respond, “ _how bad?_ ”

Carisi lifted himself into a sitting position. Barba still said nothing. He dipped his head and kissed Carisi’s knuckles instead.

“What I mean is, if it’s so bad you can’t tell me how bad it is, how come my chances dropped from 50/50 to zero as soon as they had Cabot in custody?”

“Has nothing to do with Cabot,” Barba said hoarsely. “I mean, it has everything to do with Cabot, but — Jonathan Lampeter set the devices incorrectly. He didn’t factor in three weeks for the embryo’s age, for implantation, for how they calculate 40 weeks of pregnancy, He was either careless or malicious. No one knows.” 

“You were told before I was.”

“Liv thought I was the best person to break it to you. You’re going to be full term at least three weeks before the timer runs out on the devices. I’m sorry.”

“Had a feeling that’s what was up, after all the investigation I did into my own case.” Carisi tried to laugh, then tried to steel himself against the terror of hopelessness, but when Barba threw both arms around him, embracing him tightly, he broke down.

So did Barba.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed as they clutched each other, sobbing, holding on like two men falling off a cliff together. Finally, Carisi lifted his head. “You gotta promise me something, Raf.”

“Anything.” Barba drew Carisi’s hand to his heart and stared sincerely into his eyes, a level of sincerity Carisi wasn’t sure he’d ever seen from Barba before.

“If there’s a baby, you’ll look out for him or her. I know the baby’s Liv’s, and I know Liv’s gonna give the kid the best home, but there’s got to be as many eyes on the kid as possible. You, and Rollins, and Fin, you’ve all got to look out after the baby ‘cause God knows what Rachel Lampeter or any of them really wants.”

“I will. I promise.”

“And I wanna marry you.”

Barba smiled broadly, tears running down his cheeks as his face wrinkled in response to the hint of joy in Carisi’s words. “We can apply for a marriage license online and go to City Hall as soon as you’re ready.”

“Yeah. Maybe we can have a party afterwards, rent out the back room of a restaurant or something.”

Barba rubbed Carisi’s back with an open hand. “Whatever you want.” 

“I want everybody in the world to know I had no idea what it was to be in love, _really_ in love, till I was with you, and I want _you_ to know how stupid I was for all the reservations I had when —”

“No,” Barba said, reaching up to cradle the back of Carisi’s head with one hand, “you are not stupid. You were never stupid.”

At their wedding a month later, performed by Judge Elana Barth at a restaurant outside Battery Park — City Hall, they decided, would draw too much attention from the press, whose reporting on the FBI’s alleged misprioritization of an undercover case over Carisi’s life was necessary but sometimes intrusive — Carisi repeated what he’d told Barba about not knowing what being in love was until he was with him.

After the ceremony, Rollins had to duck into a bathroom stall to cry.

Hormones, she told herself, even though they’d recently celebrated Jesse’s first birthday.

The bathroom door burst open as Rollins leaned over the sink, wiping makeup from her cheeks. Benson stopped in her tracks, hesitating as if she was debating whether or not to walk out.

She walked towards Rollins instead. “The doctors still have three months to figure this out,” Benson said, catching Rollins’s gaze in the mirror. “There’s hope.”

Rollins turned to face Benson, with a look that said _do you really believe that for a second?_

“Life is short, Liv,” she said, “terrifyingly short.”

“I know,” Benson said, holding her arms out to Rollins, who walked into the embrace. “I know.”

“We’ve got to do something. Have you talked to Cabot?”

“This isn’t the time or the place.”

“Maybe not, but I’m scared for my partner, my friend.”

“Feds haven’t said a word to me. They don’t want us involved anymore.”

“They don’t want us going after Cabot ourselves,” Rollins said, slowly stepping out of Benson’s arms.

“Can you blame them?”

“And then there’s Declan. If Cabot starts talking without one of us there, his operation and god knows what else could be compromised.”

“We all know Murphy can hold his own,” Benson said, pressing her palms to the marble counter. “What’s this really about?”

“It’s about Carisi. It’s always been about Carisi. What we need is for Cabot to give up her supplier, who’s probably one of those guys from the basement, and then we need the supplier to give up the head of the company that designed the devices.”

“That’s the FBI’s job. And they’re the ones who originally contracted the design of the devices, the _weapons_ , inside Carisi. If they can’t locate —”

“Hey, Liv.” Rollins pressed one hip into the counter and crossed her arms. “You remember that time we went undercover as a couple looking for donor sperm?”

“Whatever it is you’re suggesting —”

“I have a contact with the feds who can put me in touch with Declan if there’s an emergency. She’s the one who makes sure we get child support every month.”

“And —”

“What if we got the feds on board, and —”

“Amanda, everyone’s waiting for us out there.”

“Cabot gives up her supplier, and you and I go undercover as a couple looking to get revenge on a family member who sexually assaulted me.”

“You think the people who made those things and then went into hiding have any empathy whatsoever?”

“No, but you and I came into money. We can offer them five million dollars for their troubles.”

Benson rolled her eyes toward the mirror but then looked at her feet, her eyes narrowing, a soft “hm” on her lips.

“I’ve thought it out,” Rollins said.

“People recognize me. I haven’t been able to go undercover in years.”

“Where these folks are, nobody knows you.”

“How far are you talking?”

“Pretty far. We’ll see what Cabot has to say.”

“I don’t know, with the kids —”

“We’ll be protected by the feds.”

“Sure,” Benson said with a sarcastic bite, “look how much they’ve done for Carisi.”

What Benson didn’t know was that Rollins had already talked to her contact at the FBI and had already made arrangements with Murphy to participate in an undercover operation near the Romanian-Hungarian border for the sake of saving Carisi’s life. Murphy was racked with guilt over his possible role in getting the explosive devices to the Lampeters, however peripheral that role may have been, and was convinced that if he’d only taken Zurzavar down six months earlier, Carisi would not have been attacked and impregnated.

Cabot would have found another way to get Rachel Lampeter out of her marriage, one that wouldn’t have required the former ADA to betray everything she once was.

If Rachel had given up most of herself bit by bit at Jonathan’s urging, Cabot had given up most of herself bit by bit as she watched the justice system fail desperate people. 

Back out in the restaurant, Bella Carisi was toasting the newly married couple while tears and champagne overflowed.

Rollins remembered that night almost six months ago when Carisi was attacked, when he’d confided in her his doubts, not in so many words but in a lot of stammers, and she wished he’d find it in his heart to be with Barba, who needed to be loved as much as Carisi did. 

_Just as much as I do_ , Rollins tried not to think. 

“I’ll help you,” Benson said in her ear, and Rollins flinched.

“Good. ‘Cause we’re set to fly out sometime next month, after they ensure it’s safe for us.” She was careful not to mention the feds or say Murphy’s name out loud. 

“I figured as much,” Benson said.

“You’re smart.”

“You are too. Give yourself some credit.”

—

The feds weren’t able to safely fly Benson and Rollins out to Romania until Carisi was 32 weeks pregnant, thirty weeks since the attack. The lieutenant and detective kept Carisi and everyone else in the dark about where they were going. Fin, holding down the fort at the 16th precinct, worried he’d be the only senior staff at SVU by the end of the month.

Cabot had give up her supplier, the man who’d pistol whipped Carisi in the basement. The feds had allowed Benson a brief visit, during which Benson simply asked Cabot, “Why?”

“Justice,” was all Cabot could come up with.

On that single word, Benson walked out and didn’t turn back.

Rollins caught Benson sitting at the edge of their hotel bed, looking wistful, staring at the wall. They’d meet with the company’s former chief engineer the next night, posing as a wealthy couple seeking revenge.

“You all right, honey?” Rollins asked.

“Don’t call me that.”

“I’ve got other names I could call you, but —”

“Amanda, the feds have the room bugged.”

“They’re not turning any of the bugs on until tomorrow.”

“We can’t know that for sure.” 

“Really, though,” Rollins said, “are you all right?”

“No. I’m worried for Noah, and I’m worried for the baby Carisi might have — my other son or daughter — and for Carisi, and for —”

“And what about you?”

_My heart is so, so broken_ , she wanted to say. 

“Cabot thinks she helped Rachel for the sake of justice,” she said instead, “and maybe in a sense she did. I believe Rachel suffered, but there had to have been alternatives. Was there really no other way for Alex to help these women? Her only option as she saw it was to join an international criminal syndicate?”

Cabot had been working with Zurzavar for at least a year before Rachel had come to her.

_My heart,_ Benson wanted to say, _my heart, my heart._

She bit her lip. Rollins snaked an arm around her. 

All she wanted was to accept Rollins’s invitation, to let the detective hold her for a while.

But there were more important tasks ahead of them. 

—

“So,” the obstetric surgeon — one of three in the hospital room with Carisi — said as she adjusted the fetal monitor wrapped around Carisi’s torso, “we have a few options.”

“A few options?” Barba snapped at her from his spot in the corner of the room. “You’re asking him to choose the circumstances under which he wants to die. Do better.”

“We don’t have time,” the obstetrician said. “He’s in labor at 32 weeks. The only way to deliver the baby is to remove the uterus.”

“Where’s your FBI contact? Where’s —”

“Raf, let her finish,” Carisi interrupted.

“However, if the fetus dies and we wait six weeks to remove the uterus, you’re at high risk of infection, the type that we’d only be able to treat by removing the uterus, and we’re fairly sure that the uterus will give out and detach from the explosive devices no matter what. You have three hours before we have to take you into surgery or before we wait this out.”

“Take me in.”

“Sonny!” 

“It’s my decision.”

“You haven’t spoken to the right people yet,” Barba insisted. “None of you have spoken to the right people yet. Where’s Liv?”

“Mr. Barba,” the obstetrician said calmly, “we have been in touch with Dr. Rachel Lampeter through —”

“Some good that does.”

“Through our FBI contacts. She knows the artificial uterus best.”

“She put my husband in this situation.” Barba pulled his phone out of his pocket, hand shaking as he scrolled through messages.

“She’s not answering you back for a couple more days,” Carisi said softly.

“Why — what the _fuck_ are the feds trying to pull, I’ll sue for —” Barba cut himself off, moved a few steps closer to Carisi, and let his eyes pore over the man in the hospital bed, the glint in them quickly shifting from anger to sadness. 

The obstetrician laid a hand on Carisi’s shoulder. “As I was saying, Dr. Lampeter isn’t sure that the uterus can hold up after a stillbirth, which means the devices will likely go off either way.”

“You guys got protection for yourselves in the OR?” Carisi asked.

“Yes. We worked with the bomb squad.”

“So you’ll be in protective suits? You’ve got everything you need? You’ve all been so good to me, I don’t want anybody getting hurt on my account.”

The doctors assured him that everyone in the OR would be safe and told him they’d be back in an hour to confirm his decision. After that, they would prepare for surgery. 

When the doctors cleared out, Barba slapped a hand over his own face and choked back sobs. His eyes quickly turned red, tears leaking onto his lashes.

“What do you need?” he asked Carisi. “Tell me. Anything you need.”

“Just you, for now.” Carisi reached for Barba’s arm. “I’ve got to call my family and tell them I love them but you know how you freaked out just now? That’ll be them, times a million. I’ll call them in a few minutes. Just stay with me a while.”

Barba climbed into the bed with Carisi, leaving barely any space for either of them to lie comfortably. “Remember that night a week before Christmas when you took me to Staten Island for sandwiches?”

“Wasn’t all that long ago.”

“We had so much hope.”

“Not that much. We had a lot more time, that’s what we had. Listen, I know you don’t want to hear it again, but I’m sorry I stalled so long last summer when —”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Barba said, his voice barely a whisper.

“We coulda had two more months of —”

“I know,” Barba said, patting Carisi’s hand, “I know. But we had what we had. How could we have expected that you’d walk away from a raid on an illegal clinic _pregnant_?”

“I’m literally the only person in the world this has happened to,” Carisi said with a hint of a laugh. “Point of pride.”

Barba let out a puff of air. “I love you, Sonny. It’s you.”

Carisi rolled as far as he could onto his side and leaned in to kiss Barba. “And you’re the great love of my life, as it turns out. Who knew?”

“Same here,” Barba said, running a hand through Carisi’s hair.

“I’ve got to call my family.”

“I know.”

“The rest of my family. You’re my family.”

“Always,” Barba promised.

“Since all the options now end with me exploding, all I want is for you to be all right, for you to be able to move forward with your life, and for the baby to be healthy.”

Barba laid a hand on Carisi’s swollen belly. “I will make sure the baby knows about how courageous you are.”

“It’s not courage. I was forced into —”

“You were courageous for rescuing the woman who the Lampeters were holding in their lab. You are courageous for all the victims you’ve helped.” Barba pressed his forehead to Carisi’s and was unable to hold back the sobs, which came fitfully in rhythm with Carisi’s.


	8. Chapter 8

Rollins clutched at the smartphone in her right hand, blinking down at the screen as she paced the floor of their tiny hotel room on the Romanian-Hungarian border.

“They’ll be here,” Benson assured her.

“Not soon enough. It’s morning in New York. The doctors are prepping Carisi for surgery. He told them they should just go through with it.”

Benson covered her mouth with one hand, her eyes widening with fear.

“Either he goes and the baby survives or they wait it out and he and the baby both go.,” Rollins said. “In the last few days, it’s become pretty clear that there’s no third option.”

“But,” Benson said, holding out an arm to Rollins, who walked into the half-embrace, “our guys here have remote access to the laptop they confiscated from the Lampeters’ lab.” She tilted her head towards the locked door that connected their room with the room next to it, a room which would appear empty if their contacts decided to check it out beforehand. “There’s time. There’s still time. There has to be.”

“So how are we going to play this?” Rollins asked, now focusing on the undercover operation that was immediately ahead of them. “I’ve been brutally assaulted by a family member, and —”

“And you’re reluctant, but I want revenge.”

“Good, good. That’ll make them think they have to get past me and my objections to make the deal, to get their two million dollars. They’ll be the ones begging us to make the deal, not the other way around.”

Benson took Rollins’s hand. “Let’s hope so.”

—

The waiting room outside a police-protected surgical unit at Mercy Hospital was full but silent. On one side sat Carisi’s parents and two of his sisters; opposite them, Barba, who was hunched over with his face in his hands, and Bella, who was lightly rubbing circles on his back.

“I don’t know why,” Bella said, “but I’m still holding out a little bit of hope.”

Through his hands, Barba nodded. 

“Oh, come on.” Carisi’s mother let out an exasperated sigh, her exasperation bordering on anger. “There’s no hope, they told us that already. Some of us are just unlucky.”

“And some of us,” Teresa added, “walk into mad scientists’ labs so they can spend the next eight months waiting to be murdered.” 

Barba removed one hand from his face and slammed it into the armrest. “He was rescuing a woman who would have otherwise been forced to have a medical procedure she didn’t consent to.”

“Yeah, exactly what wound up happening to him.”

“Who are you to say —”

“Shut up,” Bella commanded. “I know it makes you all feel better to blame Sonny’s attack on his own actions, on how he saved that woman, rather than on the people who did this to him, but shut the hell up.”

Barba returned to his original hunched-over position.

“What he did was stupid,” Gina said, “but —”

“It wasn’t stupid, it was his job,” Bella insisted. “And it wasn’t just his job, he _saved someone’s life_ , so have some goddamn respect for Sonny for once.” She turned to Barba, placed her hand on his back again, and leaned in so she could speak softly near his ear. “A little bit of hope,” she said, and he reached out to grab her hand.

—

Benson and Rollins sat at the edge of the bed, Rollins curled up next to Benson with her head buried in the crook of her shoulder, Benson’s arm protectively encircling Rollins, while Benson explained their story to the two men in the room with them, one sitting at the desk opposite the bed, the other waiting near the door to the adjoining room. 

“You’re good for the two million?” the man at the desk asked. He never gave his name, but Benson and Rollins knew that he was the former CEO of the company that had once been contracted by the FBI to make the explosives that were now inside Carisi. 

“My family’s got money. I’ve already drawn it on our bank account, and I’ve got half a million right there for you.” She signaled towards a suitcase. “They won’t miss it. They think it’s for a house.”

“I don’t know,” Rollins said into Benson’s shoulder. “This may be too much for —”

“For what you went through? This is barely enough.”

Benson told the former CEO the story that they and the feds and invented about what happened to Rollins. “How’d you get my number?” he asked.

“We didn’t.” She gave him the names of two other connections. “We found out about _them_ through an associate of our former doctor’s — when we were having fertility treatments — but that’s —”

“None of my business,” the CEO said, holding up a hand.

“So, essentially what we want to do is blow up their house six months from now. We’ll be long gone by then, out of the United States altogether.”

“I’ve got what you’re looking for, then.”

“Dr. Lampeter told me the timer is set from a computer.”

Benson felt Rollins’s breathing grow quicker and she wondered if the detective was merely acting or actually getting anxious. She held her a little closer.

“You set it and forget it,” the CEO said, smirking. He was clearly proud of his work, which gave Benson an advantage. “There’s remote password protection, so once it’s done, we’re your only outlet for changing your mind.”

Benson offered the CEO and his accomplice the suitcase full of money that the feds had procured for them. Thirty seconds after they shook on the deal, federal agents from three countries burst in through the door to the adjoining room, knocking the accomplice down in the process.

In a few swift movements, the two men had their weapons taken from them, were placed under arrest, and were led into the next room. 

Benson and Rollins, because of their connection to Sonny Carisi, were not allowed to participate in the interrogation happening on the other side of the wall.

Rollins retrieved her phone from the dresser drawer where she’d stashed it, scrolled for a second, and then reached out a hand to Benson. “Liv,” she said, “check your phone.”

—

“We need someone who can sit with the baby for a while, bond with her.”

Barba looked up, glassy-eyed, at the neonatologist. There was no news from Carisi, no news from Romania, no news on Benson and Rollins — who he was 99 percent sure were in Romania, with or without NYPD’s permission — nothing good, nothing bad, and hope was running dry. “Your husband suggested you’d be a good person to bond with her, because —”

“I’m a close friend of the baby’s mother.”

“Yes. She’s in good shape, considering. Her lungs are fully developed. We think her actual gestational age when she was born was closer to 35 weeks. Not sure how that’s possible, but —”

“Given the situation, anything’s possible.”

“Right.”

Barba followed the neonatologist down the hall to a sterile room, where he was given gloves, a protective gown, and a hair cap. A nurse helped him put on a mask and then carefully handed him the infant.

He held her in his arms, his own posture rigid, terrified he’d hurt or drop her. When she briefly blinked her eyes open, he recognized Olivia there. 

“Your mama can’t wait to meet you,” he told her. “Your mama, your brother, your —” He wanted to say _your Uncle Sonny who very implausibly brought you here_ , but he couldn’t bring the words to his throat. “Um,” he said through the mask, “is there any word on Sonny yet?”

“I’m only responsible for the baby,” the neonatologist said, “so —”

“So you can’t say anything. I understand.”

She laid a hand on Barba’s shoulder. “I’ll give you a few minutes with her before I bring her back to NICU. Her lungs are strong, though. You can tell her mother that her lungs are strong, and she’ll probably be out of here within a week.”

“I will,” Barba promised.

When the neonatologist and nurses left him alone (but with the door open and what must have been a hundred people walking back and forth outside), he relaxed his shoulders and gazed at the infant sleeping in his arms. “Your Uncle Sonny,” he said, “who very implausibly brought you here, loves you with all his heart, and I’ll make sure you always know that.”

—

“Her gestational age was probably closer to 35 weeks than 32, her lungs are in good shape, and she’ll probably be home within a week. I don’t know how I’m going to explain to Noah that he suddenly has a baby sister.” Benson stared at her phone, reading and re-reading the message. “I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to _her_ when she asks where she came from either.” She glanced over at the door separating her and Rollins from the interrogation happening in the next room. “But if she’s here, what does that mean for Carisi?”

“They might be waiting it out,” Rollins suggested.

“I hope so.”

They were quiet for a few minutes, struggling to listen to what was going on next door. “Come here,” Benson said, reaching her arms out to Rollins. 

“There right there, the feds,” Rollins said, tilting her head towards the door.

“Doesn’t affect us.”

“Yeah.” She walked into the embrace. “I hope there’s still time for Sonny,” she said, the name _Sonny_ coming out as a whispered sob.

Benson kissed Rollins’s cheekbone, then her lips. “I’m still your boss,” she commented, even as her lips hovered near the detective’s.

“We’ll work it out,” Rollins promised. “Remember what I said. If you need a friend, something a little more, something a lot more, I’m here for you. I know after what happened a few years ago, you don’t believe that, you don’t believe that I could be _there_ for you —”

“You’re a good person, Amanda. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

“You’ve never been through the first few weeks,” Rollins said suddenly, “when they’ve got their days and nights mixed up and have to be fed every few hours.”

“What?”

“The first few weeks with a baby.”

“You’ll have to guide me through it.”

Rollins moved away from Benson and sat on the bed, soon stretching out and laying her head back on the pillow from exhaustion. “Nobody’s ever asked me to guide them through anything before.”

“Give yourself some credit,” Benson said, joining Rollins on the bed.

They spoke between kisses and sobs, laying beside each other, perhaps a bit foolish given the interrogation going on next door, but perhaps not foolish at all given how worried they were about Carisi, about the horrific grief they might be facing when they came home to New York.

When they heard a loud knock at the door, Benson and Rollins both wiped their cheeks with the palms of their hands and leapt up off the bed, smoothing their shirts and slacks. “Come in,” Benson said. 

A federal agent walked all the way in, closing the door behind him. “Lieutenant Benson, Detective Rollins,” he said, nodding in their direction, “the password they gave us worked. The two devices that were implanted in Detective Carisi are disabled, according to what’s now on Lampeter’s computer. We’re waiting for a call from the surgical staff at the hospital to confirm they were removed.”

—

Sonny Carisi did not expect to wake up alive. 

He was pleasantly surprised when he woke up in a hospital bed and saw his husband sleeping in a chair beside him.

Joy rose up in his heart. 

There were so many things to wonder about, to worry about, but the realization that he was alive after all the doctors he’d talked to were certain he wouldn’t survive the surgery brought him nothing but joy — elation, practically.

Barba’s eyes were marked with dark circles even as he slept. Carisi didn’t want to wake him.

A nurse came in to check his vitals. “You’re doing well, Mr. Carisi,” she told him, and his body registered for the first time that he was no longer pregnant.

“How’s the baby?”

“Recovering in NICU, but she’ll be going home with her mother soon, they told us.”

“How —”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t in the surgical suite. He,” she said, pointing at Barba, “probably knows more than I do.”

“Thank you.” As the nurse left, Carisi breathed deep, glad to be alive, _relieved_ to be alive, not sure what kind of supernatural dumb luck brought him here. “Raf,” he said, shaking the bed rail to get Barba’s attention, “hey, Raf.”

Barba woke up with a start, almost falling out of the chair. Carisi laughed. He was out of breath, but was overjoyed to be alive enough to laugh.

Barba leaned over the rail and kissed Carisi, running a hand through his hair. “They had you open on the table for ten minutes, waiting,” he said, “holding out hope for just ten more minutes, and Liv and Rollins saved your life.”

“Liv and —”

“They’re in Romania, or Hungary, or somewhere, undercover. They didn’t tell any of us where they were going. I suspected, but I only heard from Liv for the first time an hour ago. They caught the man who designed the explosive devices. They disabled them right before the surgeons were about to remove what was left of the uterus.”

“You can tell me more about that later. Right now, I’m —” He cut himself off, craning his neck to kiss Barba’s lips, then each of his cheeks, the canyons beneath his eyes, the sides of his face ,everywhere he could think to kiss in that moment. “Right now, I’m here.”

—

**One Year Later**

“And then the bad guys put you in Uncle Sonny’s belly, and he carried you in his belly for a long time, and Mom and Aunt Amanda had to save the world while you were being born,” Noah explained to his baby sister, who was in his lap while he sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by the people who had once made up his mother’s squad. Rollins’s daughter and Fin’s grandson, who he was watching for the night so his son and son-in-law could celebrate their anniversary, sat on either side of Noah, listening intently to the tale. 

“Noah,” Benson said, a hint of warning in his voice.

“Whole thing’s true, though,” Fin pointed out. The sergeant had just put in for retirement, which meant that in a few months, Benson would be working with an (almost) entirely different squad from the one she’d worked with only two years ago.

Rollins had transferred to forensics after she and Benson disclosed their relationship. _First time in a long time I’ve seen both of you smiling so much_ , Carisi had commented. 

Carisi was an ADA, Barba had recently been appointed to a family court bench in Westchester, and there were rumors that Carisi would soon fill Barba’s shoes as SVU’s dedicated ADA.

“We didn’t save the world,” Rollins said, patting Fin’s shoulder.

“You did. You didn’t tell any of us, and I was worried there for a while, but you two saved the world.”

Rollins circled around to Benson. “Don’t steal Cati’s thunder,” she said with a smirk. 

Carisi had asked Benson to name the baby after Barba’s late grandmother. 

“Also Liv and I are getting married in six weeks, just for the sake of getting insurance lined up for the kids and you’re all invited.”

“Aww,” Carisi said, “is that what you’re putting on the wedding announcements?”

“Wedding announcements,” Benson echoed with a laugh. “We just want to live together under one roof with the three kids. That’s all.” 

Carisi shrugged. “I mean, we got married because I was the first person in history without a uterus or ovaries to get pregnant, and was, like, two months shy of exploding.”

“Sonny,” Barba said from his position on the recliner. 

Noah laughed. “I know all about how they put bombs inside Uncle Sonny that were going to —”

“Noah!” Benson shouted.

“Scoot over,” Carisi said, sitting next to Barba in the recliner, practically in his lap. 

“Have you two thought about having kids?” Rollins asked. “I know it’s not for everybody, but Sonny’s the Baby Whisperer.”

“If we do, Rafael’s gonna be the one to carry them,” Carisi said, patting Barba’s belly. Barba rolled his eyes. “I mean, we could adopt, but then we’d need all of you to say nice things about us.”

“We’re family,” Rollins said. “We don’t say nice things about each other.”

“Are we all a family?” Jesse asked from her spot on the floor.

“I don’t know whether to groan or burst into tears,” Rollins said softly.

Benson slowly lowered herself to the rug so she was sitting with the kids. “Whatever happens to us, however improbable —”

“— so improbable that it’s never happened before in human history,” Barba added.

“We are a family. All of us, always, no matter what.”


End file.
